Multifunctional Hydrogels

Book excerpt: Hydrogels are important polymer-based materials with innate fascinating properties and applications: they are three-dimensional, hydrophilic, polymeric networks that can absorb large amounts of water or aqueous fluids and are biocompatible, mechanically flexible, and soft. The incorporation of functionalities to develop smart and bioactive platforms has led to a myriad of applications. This book offers a comprehensive overview of multifunctional hydrogels, covering fundamentals, properties, and advanced applications in a progressive way. While each chapter can be read stand-alone, together they clearly describe the fundamental concepts of design, synthesis, and fabrication, as well as properties and performances of smart multifunctional hydrogels and their advanced applications in the biomedical, environmental, and robotics fields. This book: • Introduces readers to different hydrogel materials and the polymer types used to fabricate them. • Discusses conducting polymer hydrogels, nanocomposite hydrogels, and self-healing hydrogels. • Covers synthesis methodologies and fabrication techniques commonly used to confer certain structures and/or architectures. • Shows how hydrogels can be modified to incorporate new functionalities able to respond to physical and/or chemical changes. • Examines applications including bioelectronics, sensors and biosensors, tissue engineering, drug delivery, antipathogen applications, cancer theranostics, environmental applications, and soft robotics, with chapters showcasing the main advances achieved up to date in every field. Multifunctional Hydrogels: From Basic Concepts to Advanced Applications serves as a valuable resource for academic and industry researchers from interdisciplinary fields including materials science, chemistry, chemical engineering, bioengineering, physics, and pharmaceutical engineering.