A research group led by Professor Chunya Wang at China University of Petroleum (Beijing), in collaboration with Professor Guozhen Shen’s team at Beijing Institute of Technology, has designed a remarkably tough, fatigue-resistant, and multifunctional ionic biogel that could accelerate the development of next-generation wearable electronics. As reported in Science Bulletin , the new biogel combines silk fibril reinforcement with deep eutectic solvent (DES)-induced polymeric network reconstruction to create a hierarchical structure in a single, scalable processing step, and has already been used to demonstrate self-powered wearable devices capable of high-precision gesture recognition and real-time robotic hand control.
The team’s design strategy relies on synergistic structural engineering. By simply incorporating a silk fibril–DES dispersion into an aqueous polymer solution, the researchers were able to simultaneously generate a hierarchical fiber-reinforced structure, a crystalline cross-linked network, and multiple functionalities within the biogel—all in a single processing step. This strategy efficiently addresses the critical challenge of engineering gels that combine mechanical robustness with multifunctionality for complex practical applications.
The engineered biogel exhibits exceptional mechanical performance, including high toughness (~12.35 MJ/m 3 ), remarkable crack tolerance (fracture energy of 112.41 KJ/m 2 ), and superior fatigue resistance (fatigue threshold of 2286 J/m 2 ), alongside high ionic conductivity, environmental stability, and good recyclability .
To demonstrate practical utility, the researchers integrated the biogel as the triboelectric layer in wearable self-powered sensors. Within a machine-learning-facilitated system, the sensors achieved high-accuracy gesture recognition and enabled real-time, precise control of a robotic hand, highlighting the biogel’s potential for intelligent human-interactive applications.
This synergistic structural engineering strategy offers a straightforward and scalable pathway to engineer gels with multiscale hierarchical structures and superior mechanics, overcoming longstanding trade-offs between performance and processability. The advance could pave the way for more durable, multifunctional wearables suitable for complex real-world environments.
Science Bulletin
Ultra-robust ionic biogel with multiscale structure and multifunctionality for wearable self-powered human-interactive sensing