Preparation And Properties Of High Strength And Semi-interpenetrating Dual-network Antibacterial Hydrogels

As soft materials with a high water and high resemblance with biological soft tissues,polymer hydrogels are widely used in the biomedical area such as drug delivery,scaffolds for tissue engineering,and tissue repair.Similar to the extracellular matrix,the polymer hydrogel has a three-dimensional network structure.It is always a challenge to improve the toughness of a network limiting clinical applications of hydrogels.To solve this problem,this paper applied multi-crosslinks into constructing effective polymer energy dissipation mechanism and improving the mechanical properties of hydrogels.Hydrogels have not yet been widespread in biomedical engineering due several key hurdles such as poor mechanical strength and non-existent antimicrobial properties.A new semi-interpenetrating polymer network（Semi-IPN）hydrogel was prepared by interpenetrating carboxymethyl chitosan（CMCH）with acrylamide（AM）and maleic acid（MA）by covalent bond crosslinking enhanced by ionic(carboxylic-Fe³⁺)secondary crosslinks.These hydrogels show good tensile stress about 1.44 MPa,and the excellent antimicrobial properties of CMCH have been successfully introduced into the hydrogel system,so the hydrogel have excellent antibacterial activity.