Jeremy Cho (Mechanical Engineering), along with doctoral students Yiwei Gao and Negin Garakani, and undergraduate Nicholas K. K. Chai, authored a paper published in Soft Matter with Sujit S. Datta of Princeton University. The paper is titled "Scaling laws to predict humidity-induced swelling and stiffness in hydrogels."
Many soft, polymeric gel-like materials, including foodstuffs like rice or pasta, will stiffen as they dry. This work provides a mathematical scaling law to predict this stiffening behavior at various relative humidities. The results of this work can enable more rapid material discovery and selection of hydrogels for a variety of applications ranging from soft robotics to biomedicine.
