Thermo-responsive gels that absorb moisture and ooze water

Kazuya Matsumoto, Nobuki Sakikawa and Takashi Miyata ()
Additional contact information
Kazuya Matsumoto: Kansai University
Nobuki Sakikawa: SHARP Corporation
Takashi Miyata: Kansai University

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract The water content of thermo-responsive hydrogels can be drastically altered by small changes in temperature because their polymer chains change from hydrophilic to hydrophobic above their low critical solution temperature (LCST). In general, such smart hydrogels have been utilized in aqueous solutions or in their wet state, and no attempt has been made to determine the phase-transition behavior of the gels in their dried states. Here we demonstrate an application of the thermo-responsive behavior of an interpenetrating polymer network (IPN) gel comprising thermo-responsive poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) and hydrophilic sodium alginate networks in their dried states. The dried IPN gel absorbs considerable moisture from air at temperatures below its LCST and oozes the absorbed moisture as liquid water above its LCST. These phenomena provide energy exchange systems in which moisture from air can be condensed to liquid water using the controllable hydrophilic/hydrophobic properties of thermo-responsive gels with a small temperature change.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04810-8 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-04810-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04810-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().