Self-Healing in Tough Graphene Oxide Composite Hydrogels

Polymer hydrogels that are capable of spontaneously healing injury are being developed at a rapid pace because of their great potential in biomedical applications. Here, the self-healing property of tough graphene nanocomposite hydrogels fabricated by using graphene peroxide as polyfunctional initiating and cross-linking centers is reported. The hydrogels show excellent self-healing ability at ambient temperature or even lower temperatures for a short time and very high recovery degrees (up to 88% tensile strength) can be achieved at a prolonged healing time. The healed gels exhibit very high tensile strengths (up to 0.35 MPa) and extremely high elongations (up to 4900%). The strong interactions between the polyacrylamide chains and the graphene oxide sheets are essential to the mechanical strengths of the healed gels.