期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2016
卷号：113
期号：50
页码：14255-14260
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1618156113
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：SignificanceMany industrial applications often require, or would benefit greatly from, "smart" materials with complex viscoelastic properties. Traditional materials often fail to adapt or respond to changing environmental conditions, limiting their use in many industrial applications that require flow, injection or spraying, or are prepared from starting materials that are too expensive, poorly scalable, or toxic to people or the environment. Here, we exploit biomimetic multivalent noncovalent interactions to build fully scalable hydrogel materials with complex viscoelastic properties from renewable and environmentally benign materials. These low-cost, safe materials have the potential to enable novel applications; here we use them for pipeline maintenance in food and beverage manufacturing and as carriers to enhance the utility of fire retardants in fighting wildland fires. Hydrogels are a class of soft material that is exploited in many, often completely disparate, industrial applications, on account of their unique and tunable properties. Advances in soft material design are yielding next-generation moldable hydrogels that address engineering criteria in several industrial settings such as complex viscosity modifiers, hydraulic or injection fluids, and sprayable carriers. Industrial implementation of these viscoelastic materials requires extreme volumes of material, upwards of several hundred million gallons per year. Here, we demonstrate a paradigm for the scalable fabrication of self-assembled moldable hydrogels using rationally engineered, biomimetic polymer-nanoparticle interactions. Cellulose derivatives are linked together by selective adsorption to silica nanoparticles via dynamic and multivalent interactions. We show that the self-assembly process for gel formation is easily scaled in a linear fashion from 0.5 mL to over 15 L without alteration of the mechanical properties of the resultant materials. The facile and scalable preparation of these materials leveraging self-assembly of inexpensive, renewable, and environmentally benign starting materials, coupled with the tunability of their properties, make them amenable to a range of industrial applications. In particular, we demonstrate their utility as injectable materials for pipeline maintenance and product recovery in industrial food manufacturing as well as their use as sprayable carriers for robust application of fire retardants in preventing wildland fires.
