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Electrical stimulation is known to play important roles in the self-recovery of the morphological, biological, and mechanical functions of living organisms when they are damaged. However, artificial soft materials that exhibit electrically tunable morphological and mechanical functions have rarely been investigated. Here, we report a facile strategy for gradually modulating the mechanical properties of hydrogels, including electrically tunable toughness, hysteresis, self-recovery, and crack resistance. The hydrogel is composed of thousands of alternating hydrophilic gel layers with a high electrical response and hydrophobic layers of polymer nanodomains. The soft gel layer is found to respond to the electric field and generates H-bonds, which serve as reversible physical cross-links and layer adhesives to dissipate energy and dynamically modulate the mechanical properties of materials. This study provides insight into the development of responsive soft materials with various mechanical properties.
Yue et al. (Thu,) studied this question.