Continuous fabrication of cellulose nanocrystal/poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate hydrogel fiber from nanocomposite dispersion: Rheology, preparation and characterization

Advances in hydrogel design are yielding new hydrogel materials with diverse macroscopic topological structures. Among these, hydrogel fibers have been considered as a new class of hydrogel material with unique spatiotemporal properties. In this study, based on the novel non-template dynamic-crosslinking-spinning (DCS) method which has been demonstrated for scalable fabrication of size-controllable hydrogel fibers from oligomers, the method involved the use of one-step production of nanocomposite hydrogel fiber with weakly-gelled nanoparticle/oligomer (cellulose nanocrystals/poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate, CNC/PEGDA) dispersion, where the interparticle interactions between CNC dominate the rheological property. The weakly-gelled CNC/PEGDA dispersion exhibited viscoelastic and shear thinning behavior, where continuous and uniform CNC/PEGDA hydrogel fibers were successfully fabricated by controllable extrusion. The diameter and water retention of the fibers could be controlled by the CNC content and spinning parameters. In addition, mechanical properties of the fiber were found to increase in the presence of CNC.