Swelling Behaviors of Hydrogels with Alternating Neutral/Highly Charged Sequences

Polyelectrolyte gels comprising fixed ions exhibit swelling behaviors because of external solution conditions. Such behaviors are usually explained by using the Flory–Rehner model that considers the Donnan equilibrium. However, this model assumes a homogeneous distribution for fixed ions; therefore, its applicability to the case of heterogeneous distributions remains unclear. Here, we successfully designed a hydrogel with alternating...