Universal Behavior of Fractal Water Structures Observed in Various Gelation Mechanisms of Polymer Gels, Supramolecular Gels, and Cement Gels

Overview

Journal Gels

Date 2023 Jul 28

PMID 37504385

Authors

Shin Yagihara

Seiei Watanabe

Yuta Abe

Megumi Asano

Kenta Shimizu

Hironobu Saito

Yuko Maruyama

Rio Kita

Naoki Shinyashiki

Shyamal Kumar Kundu

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

So far, it has been difficult to directly compare diverse characteristic gelation mechanisms over different length and time scales. This paper presents a universal water structure analysis of several gels with different structures and gelation mechanisms including polymer gels, supramolecular gels composed of surfactant micelles, and cement gels. The spatial distribution of water molecules was analyzed at molecular level from a diagram of the relaxation times and their distribution parameters (- diagrams) with our database of the 10 GHz process for a variety of aqueous systems. Polymer gels with volume phase transition showed a small decrease in the fractal dimension of the hydrogen bond network (HBN) with gelation. In supramolecular gels with rod micelle precursor with amphipathic molecules, both the elongation of the micelles and their cross-linking caused a reduction in the fractal dimension. Such a reduction was also found in cement gels. These results suggest that the HBN inevitably breaks at each length scale with relative increase in steric hindrance due to cross-linking, resulting in the fragmentation of collective structures of water molecules. The universal analysis using diagrams presented here has broad applicability as a method to characterize diverse gel structures and evaluate gelation processes.

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