Preparation Of Poly(Ethylene Glycol) Diacrylate(PEGDA) Hydrogel And Evaluation Of Its Properties

Though immense improvements in biomedicine have been achieved in recent years due to advance biomaterials availability,the need for new materials to address many existing problems and novel problems is ever present.Hydrogels are favorably viewed as viable materials to mitigate this need given their close similarity to many bio tissues.Poly(ethylene glycol)diacrylate(PEGDA)and polyacrylic acid(PAA)are some of the best promising polymers to be used as precursor for fabrication of hydrogels based bioapplicable materials and have been extensively studied in recent years.PEGDA and PAA are highly hydrophilic,biocompatible and nontoxic,properties desirable for bioapplicable materials.However,their inherent poor mechanical properties limit their application to a few areas.Herein,we explore the synthesis parameters of PEGDA-based single component and composite hydrogels(PEGA400/PAA2000 and PEGDA400/PEGDA700)and evaluate their effect on characteristic dynamics of fabricated gels.Several hydrogel discs were synthesized at various concentrations and several polymer blend compositions using visible light at short irradiation time and analyzed for compressive strength,absorption property,and optical refractivity.It was found that concentration of prepolymer solution affects compressive strength progressively,increasing as concentration increased for all blends.The addition of PAA2000 to form blends with PEGDA400 improved compressive property,achieving a more than 100% increase from 0.125 to 0.266 MPa at 40 w/v% solute concentration.PEGDA700 addition adversely affected compressive property,reducing compressive strength as its contents in the blend increase by up to 78.4% at 80 w/v% concentration.Also,the water absorptivity of the sample gels increase as the PAA content increase;conversely,PEGDA700 presence in the network reduced absorption property.Varying component composition in composite samples shows that for blend containing PAA increasing PAA content weakens network structure but enhances absorption;composition increment of PEGDA700 had little effect on absorptivity.PAA containing sample had poor transparency;PEGDA samples exhibited considerable optical transparency and promising refractivity.The refractive index increased with increasing polymer content but remain relatively unchanged when components were varied.All experiments were conducted using visible light and carried out at maximum irradiation time of one(1)minute.