ArticleScience advances2024
Dehydration drives damage in the freezing of brittle hydrogels.
Article in Science advances, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Inorganic Ionic Polymerization-Anchored Polymer Networks for Ultrastrong and Ultratough Eutectogels.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Article
- Hysteresis-Free Near-Ideal Elastic Gels.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Article
- Storage and Stability of AAV-Containing Fibrin Hydrogels for Retinal Gene Therapy.Gels (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Iron-Responsive Deferasirox Release from Covalently Grafted Hydrogels on Microwires Extends Iron Chelation Time Scales.ACS applied materials & interfaces · 2026Article
- Phase field modelling of fracturing in frozen foods.Current research in food science · 2026Article
- Flexible dry electrodes for electrocardiographic monitoring: Working principles, design strategies, and recent advances.iScience · 2025Review
- Damage due to ice crystallization.Scientific reports · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is widely known that freezing breaks soft, wet materials. However, the mechanism underlying this damage is still not clear. To understand this process, we freeze model, brittle hydrogel samples, while observing the growth of ice-filled cracks that break these apart. We show that damage is not caused by the expansion of water upon freezing or the growth of ice-filled cavities in the hydrogel that exert pressure on the surrounding material. Instead, local ice growth dehydrates the adjacent hydrogel, leading to drying-induced fracture. This dehydration is driven by the process of cryosuction, whereby undercooled ice sucks nearby water toward itself, feeding ice growth. Our results highlight the strong analogy between freezing damage and desiccation cracking, which we anticipate being useful for developing an understanding of both topics. Our results should also give useful insights into a wide range of freezing processes, including cryopreservation, food science, and frost heave.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.