Work

Bread-inspired rapid gelation-induced bubble “growth-fixation” strategy to fabricate macroporous hydrogels for flexible sensors

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Macroporous hydrogels (MPH) have attracted considerable interest due to their unique advantages in flexible sensing, pollutant adsorption, and tissue engineering. However, current fabrication approaches for MPH require sophisticated equipment or complex procedures and struggle to prevent structural inhomogeneity caused by bubble aging. Inspired by bread fermentation, we propose a rapid gelation method (~10 s) combining a catechol-Fe 3+ redox system with thiol-ene click chemistry, enabling “growth-fixation” of bubble during gelation to form hydrogels with sub-millimeter macropores (175 to 400 μm). The rapidly crosslinked network effectively inhibits bubble coalescence and stabilizes pore size, which can be precisely tuned by modulating the gelation process. Owing to the dynamic tuning of mechanical properties and ionic pathways by the macroporous structure, the MPH exhibits outstanding sensing performance, with a pressure sensitivity of up to −33.04 % kPa −1 , a response time of 176 ms, and a low detection limit of 0.04 kPa. This exceptional performance supports applications in motion monitoring, handwriting recognition, and Morse code decoding. This work offers a simple, efficient, and universal strategy for fabricating high-performance MPH.

Source: Chemical Engineering Journal

DOI: 10.1016/j.cej.2025.166923