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Fracture behaviour of bacterial cellulose hydrogel: Microstructural effect

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conference contribution
posted on 2017-01-26, 11:04 authored by Xing Gao, Zhijun Shi, Changqing Liu, Guang Yang, Vadim SilberschmidtVadim Silberschmidt
A growing interest in fibrous biomaterials, especially hydrogels, is due to a fact that they promise a good potential in biomedical applications thanks to their attractive biological properties and similar microstructure that mimics its in vivo environment. Since they are usually employed as a main load-bearing-component when introduced into body environment, a comprehensive understanding of their application-relevant mechanical behaviour, such as deformation and fracture, as well as structure-function relationships is essential. To date, deformation behaviour and mechanisms of hydrogels were well documented; still, a lack of understanding of their fracture behaviour, especially structure-function relationships, could complicate an evaluation of their applicability. Hence, this work carried out four types of test – uniaxial tension, single-notch, double-notch and central-notch fracture testing – to investigate fracture behaviour of fully-hydrated and freeze-dried bacterial cellulose (BC) hydrogel. Our results support a significant role of interstitial water – free and bonded water – played in fracture behaviour of the studied BC hydrogel.

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge the 7th European Community Framework Programme for financial support through a Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES) Project entitled “Micro-Multi-Material Manufacture to Enable Multifunctional Miniaturised Devices (M6)” (Grant No. PIRSES-GA-2010-269113). Additional support from China-European Union technology cooperation programme (Grant No. 1110) is also acknowledged.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Procedia Structural Integrity

Volume

2

Pages

1237 - 1243

Citation

GAO, X. ...et al., 2016. Fracture behaviour of bacterial cellulose hydrogel: Microstructural effect. Procedia Structural Integrity, 2, pp. 1237-1243.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016

Notes

This paper is presented at the 21st European Conference on Fracture, ECF21, 20-24 June 2016, Catania, Italy. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution -NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

ISSN

2452-3216

Language

  • en