In
recent years, hydrogels as an attractive class of intelligent soft
materials have been applied in various advanced fields, including
electronic materials, wearable devices, and wound dressing materials.
However, it still remains a critical challenge to integrate information
encryption transmission capability, antibacterial activity, high mechanical
performance, adhesiveness, and self-healable ability into one material
and achieve the synergistic characteristics through a simple method.
In our study, a facile strategy of a plant-inspired hydrogel was proposed,
which provides a novel initiator-free photo-cross-linked hydrogel
system by simply mixing the coumarin derivative Pho-CA and the monomer in water, and then obtaining the hydrogel Gel-C-Am under the irradiation of UV light without adding
any other cross-linking agents and initiators, and this process is
very similar to the growth process of plants in nature. This novel
hydrogel presents desirable mechanical properties (including twist,
stretchability, and recoverability), which exhibits elongation of
approximately 1600%. More interestingly, Gel-C-Am hydrogel
displays reversible adhesiveness to various substrates (such as glass,
paper, leaves, and rubber), and its adhesion properties can be regulated
by water: the viscosity disappears when its surface becomes wet, and
the viscosity will recover after the water evaporates. In addition,
the developed hydrogel has certain self-healable ability. Two pieces
of the Gel-C-Am hydrogel can combine together and reshape
into one piece in water, and the fused hydrogel has uniform and interconnected
pores under SEM. Based on the characteristic of Pho-CA whose fluorescence get recovery after UV irradiation, the hydrogel
can be used in the field of encryption and decryption. Also, the resulting Gel-C-Am hydrogel shows an effective antibacterial activity
and can potentially be addressed as antibacterial coatings. Taken
together, the formation of the novel fluorescent hydrogel system is
just like the growth of a plant in the presence of water and light, Pho-CA and the monomer will form a highly stretchable and
recoverable self-healing hydrogel with water-controlled adhesiveness.
The developed Gel-C-Am hydrogel shows favorable attributes
and is suitable for applications in antibacterial polymeric coatings
and information encryption transmission.