We encounter gels on a daily basis in food, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Some gels are very responsive – something can happen to them and they will break down. Some gels are very robust and can survive a lot of stress. Often when a responsive gel responds to a stimulus it breaks down so it is no longer a gel you can do anything with. ‘That’s useful in itself, but you don’t always want that,’ says David Smith whose team at the University of York have developed the new responsive and robust gel.
One gel network can be assembled and responsively disassembled while the other polymer retains the material’s integrity
Interested to know more? Read the full news article by Jennifer Newton in Chemistry World here…
Read the article by D J Cornwell, B O Okesola and D K Smith in Soft Matter:
Daniel J. Cornwell, Babatunde O. Okesola and David K. Smith
Soft Matter, 2013,9, 8730-8736
DOI: 10.1039/C3SM51967H, Paper
