Supramolecular Hybrid Hydrogels from Noncovalently Functionalized Graphene with Block Copolymers

In recent years, graphene has become a prevailing topic in the materials community. Numerous applications of graphene have been generated, including gas sensors, photovoltaics, field-effect transistors, etc. In this paper, we demonstrate that graphene sheets could serve as a desirable inorganic constituent in constructing hybrid polymeric hydrogels via supramolecular routes, which currently is not so popular as the other applications. In this paper, graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets were modified by grafting β-cyclodextrins first, leading to chemical converted graphene (CCG), and then noncovalently functionalized by block copolymers AZO-PDMA-b-PNIPAM via inclusion complexation. The resulted hybrid graphene inclusion complex (HGIC) was fully characterized by a combination of techniques including UV–vis spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Raman spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Then, due to the thermo sen...