Prof. Tao XIE's Group

      Hydrogels are widely used in bio-related fields because of their softness and high water content which on the contrary, limit the usages in other areas, such as printing industry. Highly demanded to overcome this intrinsic contradiction, our group drills the soft gels with spatially controlled UV light, and opens an avenue to deeply explore the applications of such materials. More specifically, through spatially absorbing the hydrophobic inks, obtained surface patterns can be transferred to flexible substrate which is the key process for printing. In addition, the dynamic covalent hydrogels show a variety of advantages including recyclable, sequentially manipulating. Finally, we show the usage of our hydrogels in environmentally friendly printing industry, and achieve printing of flexible electronics. This work is online published in Materials Horizons (DOI: 10.1039/C9MH00090A).

��