Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-16-2025
Abstract
Soft tissues exhibit remarkable stretchability, fracture toughness, and stress–relaxation ability. They possess a large water content to support cellular processes. Mimicking such a combination of mechanical and physical properties in hydrogels is important for tissue engineering applications but remains challenging. This work aims to develop a hydrogel that can combine excellent mechanical properties with cellular viability. The research focused on polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)/agar double-network (DN) hydrogels, fabricated by thermal gelation and freeze–thawing methods. Their mechanical properties were characterized through tension, compression, fracture, and stress–relaxation tests, and their cellular viability was measured through cytotoxicity tests. The results show that the PVA/agar DN gels are highly stretchable (>200%) and compressible (>30%) while containing high water content. The incorporation of agar by 6 wt% improved the fracture toughness of hydrogels from 1 to 1.76 kJ/m2. The degree of stress–relaxation, a key indicator of gel viscoelastic properties, improved by roughly 170% with an increase in agar content from 0 to 6 wt%. Cytotoxicity analysis showed that the gels, being physically cross-linked, were able to promote cellular proliferation. This work shows that tough and viscoelastic PVA/agar DN gels are suitable for soft tissue engineering applications, especially cartilage repair.
Recommended Citation
Lamas, Ismael, Bhuvana L. Chandrashekar, Claudia C. Biguetti, and Mohammad R. Islam. "Tissue-like Fracture Toughness and Stress–Relaxation Ability in PVA-Agar-Based Hydrogels for Biomedical Applications." Gels 11, no. 9 (2025): 747. https://doi.org/10.3390/gels11090747
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Gels
DOI
10.3390/gels11090747
Comments
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).