Highly elastic and self-healing composite colloidal gels

Researchers developed a novel nanocomposite colloidal gel with an unprecedented combination of mechanical properties and self-healing capacity by careful control of particle assembly, fundamental understanding of the mechanism of gel network formation, and precise tuning of composition and structure of the resulting gel networks. They used amphoteric soft gelatin nanoparticles and negatively charged hard silica nanoparticles as the organic and inorganic colloidal building blocks. Electrostatic assembly of the nanoparticles into homogeneous binary networks was facilitated by controlling the pH of the colloidal system to prevent uncontrollable aggregation resulting from direct mixing of attractive binary colloids