Morphological effect on swelling behaviour of hydrogel

Hydrogels are hydrophilic polymer networks that are capable of imbibing large amounts of water. In this work, hydrogels prepared from natural and synthetic polymers were irradiated by using electron beam irradiation. The morphology of hydrogel inter-polymeric network (IPN) was investigated using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The studies reveal correlations between pore sizes of IPN with degree of cross-linking. This relation also has an effect on swelling properties of the hydrogel. The results indicated that hydrogel with smaller pore size, as a result of much dense IPN, would decrease water uptake capacity. Combination of natural and synthetic polymers to form hydrogel affects the pore size and swelling property of the hydrogel as compared to each component of polymer.