Enhanced thermal response of 3D-printed bilayer hydrogels via nanoclay incorporation

Abstract

There exist numerous opportunities to design stimuli-responsive bilayer hydrogels for enhanced actuation using simple and robust techniques. Specifically, digital light processing (DLP) 3D printing offers a robust technique for multi-layered hydrogel fabrication. However, nanocomposite hydrogels utilizing this technique have not yet been widely realized. Nanoclay incorporation has been shown to improve the actuation of poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide) (pNIPAAm) hydrogels; however, opportunities remain to study the relationship between clay morphology and thermal response, particularly in a 3D-printed bilayer system. In this work, we utilized an ethanol-water cosolvent, hydrogel precursor solution to incorporate montmorillonite (MMT) clay into 3D-printed pNIPAAm hydrogels. By varying the MMT loading, we demonstrated that a low loading of MMT (0.5 wt% relative to the mass of NIPAAm monomer) induced the greatest enhancement of the initial rate and final magnitude of actuation in the studied hydrogels. We utilized poly(2-hydroxyethyl acrylate) (pHEA) as a passive layer to form bilayers by sequentially printing pHEA before the pNIPAAm/MMT hydrogels, and used those hydrogels to demonstrate the accelerated actuation of 3D-printed pNIPAAm/MMT-pHEA bilayers compared to clay-free, pNIPAAm-pHEA bilayers. Through comparison to a mathematical framework and fabrication of an all-pNIPAAm bilayer, we suggested that the model has limitations for the prediction of bilayer curvature in these systems due to the inability of certain hydrogels to overcome the inertia of the passive layer. Overall, this work showcases the utility of MMT as a handle for tunability in 3D-printed pNIPAAm bilayer hydrogels.

Graphical abstract: Enhanced thermal response of 3D-printed bilayer hydrogels via nanoclay incorporation

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
11 Feb 2025
Accepted
20 May 2025
First published
11 Jun 2025
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Mol. Syst. Des. Eng., 2025, Advance Article

Enhanced thermal response of 3D-printed bilayer hydrogels via nanoclay incorporation

F. Klincewicz, S. Kalidindi, S. Liu, K. Sangroula and L. T. J. Korley, Mol. Syst. Des. Eng., 2025, Advance Article , DOI: 10.1039/D5ME00018A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements