Accelerated Engineering of Optimized Functional Composite Hydrogels via High-Throughput Experimentation

Abstract

The Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) seeks to accelerate the discovery and engineering of advanced materials via high-throughput experimentation (HTE), which is a challenging task, given the common trade-off between design for optimal processability vs performance. Here, we report a HTE method based on automated formulation, synthesis, and multiproperty characterization of bulk soft materials in well plate formats that enables accelerated engineering of functional composite hydrogels with optimized properties for processability and performance. The method facilitates rapid high-throughput screening of hydrogel composition−property relations for multiple properties in well plate formats. The feasibility and utility of the method were demonstrated by application to several functional composite hydrogel systems, including alginate/poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) and poly(ethylene glycol) dimethacrylate (PEGDMA)/poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) hydrogels. The HTE method was leveraged to identify formulations of conductive PEGDMA/PEDOT:PSS composite hydrogels for optimized performance and processability in three-dimensional (3D) printing. This work provides an advance in experimental methods based on automated dispensing, mixing, and sensing for the accelerated engineering of soft functional materials.

Cutting Edge High‐Throughput Synthesis and Characterization Techniques in Combinatorial Materials Science

“…[13] In 1995, Xiang and Schultz used mask-assisting deposition to parallelly manufacture a spatially addressable superconducting materials library, which pioneered the combinatorial approach in materials research. [14] After then, the combinatorial approach was applied to research on magnetoresistance, [15,16] luminescent, [17][18][19][20][21][22] superconducting, [13,[23][24][25] semiconductor, [26] catalysis, [27][28][29] metallic alloys, [30][31][32] hydrogels and polymers [33][34][35] and gradually formed a new discipline called as combinatorial materials science. [36][37][38][39] It is noted that the HT concept can run through the entire developing process of materials including computation, synthesis, characterization, and data mining.…”