Characterization Techniques of Hydrogel and Its Applications

Abstract

Over the past few decades, advances in hydrogel technologies have spurred devel- opment in the personal care products and medical, pharmaceutical, and agricultural field aspects due to their unique biocompatibility, flexible methods ofsynthesis, range of constituents, and desirable physical characteristics. Hydrogels are hydrophilic, three-dimensional hydrophilic polymeric networks, capable ofabsorbing large quan- tities of water, biological fluids and simulating biological tissue when they get swollen due to chemical or physical cross-linking of individual polymer chains. Hydrogels are characterized by the nature of their constituent polymers, making them synthetic, natural, or hybrid. The use ofnatural polymers in hydrogel synthesis is advantageous in biomedical applications due to their biodegradability and non- toxicity, whereas synthetic polymers are hydrophobic, possessing strong covalent bonds within their matrix, which allow for more durability and mechanical strength. In order to design hydrogels with the desired performance and structure, character- ization of hydrogel requires different tools and techniques that includes swelling, sol-gel analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, thermal gravimetric analysis, X-ray diffraction analysis, gel permeation chromatography, atomic forcemicroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy. In this chapter, we focused and discussed about the properties, preparation methods, characterization techniques, and their most significant and current biomedical applications ofhydrogels with the patents.