Commonly synthetic polyethylene glycol polyurethane (PEG-PU) hydrogels possess poor mechanical properties, such as robustness and toughness, which limits their load-bearing application. Hence, it remains a challenge to prepare PEG-PU hydrogels with excellent mechanical properties. Herein, a novel double-crosslinked (DC) PEG-PU hydrogel was fabricated by combining chemical with physical crosslinking, where trimethylolpropane (TMP) was used as the first chemical crosslinker and polyphenol compound tannic acid (TA) was introduced into the single crosslinked PU network by simple immersion process. The second physical crosslinking was formed by numerous hydrogen bonds between urethane groups of PU and phenol hydroxyl groups in TA, which can endow PEG-PU hydrogel with good mechanical properties, self-recovery and a self-healing capability. The research results indicated that as little as a 30 mg·mL-1 TA solution enhanced the tensile strength and fracture energy of PEG-PU hydrogel from 0.27 to 2.2 MPa, 2.0 to 9.6 KJ·m-2, respectively. Moreover, the DC PEG-PU hydrogel possessed good adhesiveness to diverse substrates because of TA abundant catechol groups. This work shows a simple and versatile method to prepare a multifunctional DC single network PEG-PU hydrogel with excellent mechanical properties, and is expected to facilitate developments in the biomedical field.
Keywords: double crosslinking; mechanical properties; multifunction; polyurethane hydrogel; tannic acid.