Scientists have invented a hydrogel fabric that's 5 times stronger than steel

Scientists have created a new hydrogel material reinforced with fibres that they say is up to five times harder to break than carbon steel – but still easy to bend and stretch.

Hokkaido University

That combination of properties means the new fabric could be used as the basis for artificial ligaments and tendons designed to help the body heal – or in manufacturing or fashion where a very tough but elastic material is needed.

Researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan developed the fabric, called fibre-reinforced soft composite(or FRSC), by combining hydrogels containing high levels of water with glass fibre fabric.

The end result is a material that's 25 times tougher than glass fibre fabric; 100 times tougher than hydrogels; and five times as strong as carbon steel, in terms of the energy required to break them.
While hydrogels have already been touted as suitable materials for healing wounds and building soft robots, their lack of toughness has previously limited their usefulness – something which the new research could change.
"This work provides a good guide toward the design of FRSCs with extraordinary fracture resistance capacity," the researchers write in their paper.

The findings are published in Advanced Functional Materials