A tough, anticorrosive hydrogel consisting of bio-friendly resources for conductive and electromagnetic shielding materials

Abstract

The rapid development of electronic technology requires the use of high performance electromagnetic interference shielding materials to establish a safe environment, and environmentally friendly materials cannot be ignored. This paper explores the use of sodium alginate (SA), a naturally readily biodegradable material, to induce spontaneous assembly polymerisation by the addition of monovalent tide salts (NaCl); this is then chemically cross-linked with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and polyethylene glycol (PEG) to form a highly ductile support structure between them, resulting in an anticorrosive, highly ductile hydrogel that can be used as a conductive and electromagnetic shielding material. The results indicate that the strength of the PVA-PEG-SA-180 hydrogel is 16.1 MPa, the elongation at break is 204.93%, and the conductivity of 15 ms mm⁻¹ is 174.4%, 188.14%, and 25041.7% higher than that of the PVA-PEG-SA-0 hydrogel. At a thickness of only 2 mm, the average electromagnetic shielding effectiveness (SE) was 32.64 dB. It is worth mentioning that the corrosion protection effect appeared after only 7 days.