from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
PVA hydrogels can be formed via physical crosslinking (e.g. by cyclic freezing/thawing of aqueous polyvinyl alcohol solutions) or with a chemical cross-linker. Physical crosslinking is more useful for biomedical applications since it contains no harmful cross-linker residues. This work, therefore, focused on studying properties of physically crosslinked hydrogels with different concentrations of polyvinyl alcohol (2.5 to 15 wt%) prepared via cyclic freezing/thawing under different cryogenic conditions: in the liquid nitrogen (–196 °C), in two different laboratory freezers (–80 °C and –18 °C) and the ice bath. Furthermore, the effects of the addition of several cryoprotectants were evaluated. The optical and mechanical properties of the prepared samples were studied, and the microstructure of the hydrogels was observed by scanning electron microscopy after freeze-drying.
Keywords: Hydrogel, polyvinyl alcohol, rheology, scanning electron microscopy© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.