'Super-jelly' hydrogel can withstand elephant’s weight

The jelly-like material can reportedly withstand the weight of an elephant standing on it and completely recover to its original shape, even though it’s 80 per cent water.

The material looks and feels like a squishy jelly, but acts like an ultra-hard shatterproof glass when compressed despite its high water content. Researchers believe that applications could include bioelectronics and even cartilage replacement for biomedical use.

Described in Nature Materials, the non-water portion of the material is a network of polymers held together by reversible on/off interactions that control the material’s mechanical properties. 

The way materials behave — whether they’re soft or firm, brittle or strong — is dependent upon their molecular structure. Stretchy, rubber-like hydrogels have many properties that make them a popular research subject, such as toughness and self-healing capabilities, but making hydrogels that can withstand compression without getting crushed is challenging.

“In order to make materials with the mechanical properties we want, we use crosslinkers, where two molecules are joined through a chemical bond,” said the study's first author Dr Zehuan Huang, from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry.