Highly Stretchable, Strain Sensing Hydrogel Optical Fibers

Jingjing Guo; Xinyue Liu; Nan Jiang; Ali K Yetisen; Hyunwoo Yuk; Changxi Yang; Ali Khademhosseini; Xuanhe Zhao; Seok-Hyun Yun

doi:10.1002/adma.201603160

Highly Stretchable, Strain Sensing Hydrogel Optical Fibers

Adv Mater. 2016 Dec;28(46):10244-10249. doi: 10.1002/adma.201603160. Epub 2016 Oct 7.

Authors

Jingjing Guo^{1

2}, Xinyue Liu³, Nan Jiang^{4

5}, Ali K Yetisen¹, Hyunwoo Yuk³, Changxi Yang², Ali Khademhosseini⁴, Xuanhe Zhao³, Seok-Hyun Yun¹

Affiliations

¹ Harvard Medical School and Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, 65 Landsdowne Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, USA.
² State Key Laboratory of Precision Measurement Technology and Instruments, Department of Precision Instruments, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
³ Soft Active Materials Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
⁴ Biomaterials Innovation Research Center, Engineering in Medicine Division, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology, 122, Luoshi Road, Wuhan, 430070, China.

Abstract

A core-clad fiber made of elastic, tough hydrogels is highly stretchable while guiding light. Fluorescent dyes are easily doped into the hydrogel fiber by diffusion. When stretched, the transmission spectrum of the fiber is altered, enabling the strain to be measured and also its location.

Keywords: absorbance spectroscopy; fiber optics; hydrogels; strain sensing.

Abstract

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