Self-Healing and Shape-Memory Hydrogels

Abstract

Hydrogels are soft and smart materials with great similarity to biological systems. In the past decade, a significant progress has been achieved to produce mechanically strong and tough hydrogels. Another major challenge in gel science is to generate self-healing and shape-memory functions in hydrogels to extend their application areas. Several strategies have been developed to create self-healing ability in hydrogels by replacing the chemically cross-linked polymer network with a reversible one. Moreover, a combination of strong and weak physical cross-links was used to produce hydrogels with both self-healing and shape-memory behavior. In this review, I present recent developments in the field of self-healing and shape memory hydrogels by mainly focusing our achievements.