Rapid self-healing of supramolecular hydrogels and their functional enhancement are of great importance and interest to the area of hydrogel materials.

Xiang Ma and colleagues, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China, have developed a hybrid supramolecular polymeric hydrogel via simply mixing a host cyclodextrin polymer, a guest α-bromonaphthalene polymer, and 6-thio-β-cyclodextrin modified gold nanoparticles (GPCDs) in aqueous solution.

The embedding of colloidal gold nanoparticle hybrids markedly enhances the stiffness of the system. Both the storage modulus G’ and the loss modulus G” are almost twice as high as those of the GPCD-free hydrogel according to the dynamic oscillatory data. The hybrid hydrogel also shows rapid self-healing, which takes about one minute.

This work may provide a simple but effective way to fabricate stable and high performance hybrid supramolecular hydrogel materials.

• A hybrid supramolecular polymeric hydrogel with rapidly self-healing property,
  Xiang Ma, Lin Chen, Hui Chen, Xuyang Yao, Tian He,
  Chem. Asian J. 2015.
  DOI: 10.1002/asia.201500704