Hydrogels are widely used biomaterials in the delivery of therapeutic agents, including drugs, genes, proteins, etc., as well as tissue engineering, due to obvious properties such as biocompatibility and their similarity to natural body tissues. Some of these substances have the feature of injectability, which means that the substance is injected into the desired place in the solution state and then turns into the gel, which makes it possible to administer them from a way with a minimal amount of invasion and eliminate the need for surgery to implant pre-formed materials. Gelation can be caused by a stimulus and/or spontaneously. Suppose this induces due to the effect of one or many stimuli. In that case, the material in question is called stimuli-responsive because it responds to the surrounding conditions. In this context, we introduce the different stimuli that cause gelation and investigate the different mechanisms of the transformation of the solution into the gel in them. Also, we study special structures, such as nano gels or nanocomposite gels.

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Background The slitting method is a widely used destructive technique for the determination of residual stresses. Because of the rich data content of the full-field methods, optical techniques such as digital image correlation (DIC) are replacing strain gages for surface measurements. Objective The objective of the current paper is to overcome the difficulties that arise in using the DIC technique combined with the slitting method. The present noise, low signal-to-noise ratio, and systematic errors are the main impediments to the use of DIC in the slitting method. Methods An approach based on the eigenstrain concept was exploited to ascertain the optimum region of interest (ROI) for the analysis. After that, a robust procedure was implemented to utilize the DIC method while excluding the rigid body motion and rotation artifacts from the obtained displacements. Results Different slitting steps may cause dissimilar rigid body motions and rotations of the specimen. The proposed method was able to eliminate all of these different shears and stretches in the images simultaneously. The slitting experiment was conducted on a symmetric cross-ply composite specimen, and the slit progressed down to half the thickness. Although some rigid body motions were large, the method managed to exclude all of them for eight slitting steps. Conclusion A comparison made between the results of the current method and those of the strain gage technique shows that they are in acceptable agreement with each other, and this full-field method can be extended to smaller scales or other destructive techniques.