Current synthetic elastomers suffer from the well‐known trade‐off between toughness and stiffness. By a combination of multiscale experiments and atomistic simulations, a transparent unfilled elastomer with simultaneously enhanced toughness and stiffness is demonstrated. The designed elastomer comprises homogeneous networks with ultrastrong, reversible, and sacrificial octuple hydrogen bonding (HB), which evenly distribute the stress to each polymer chain during loading, thus enhancing stretchability and delaying fracture. Strong HBs and corresponding nanodomains enhance the stiffness by restricting the network mobility, and at the same time improve the toughness by dissipating energy during the transformation between different configurations. In addition, the stiffness mismatch between the hard HB domain and the soft poly(dimethylsiloxane)‐rich phase promotes crack deflection and branching, which can further dissipate energy and alleviate local stress. These cooperative mechanisms endow the elastomer with both high fracture toughness (17016 J m⁻²) and high Young's modulus (14.7 MPa), circumventing the trade‐off between toughness and stiffness. This work is expected to impact many fields of engineering requiring elastomers with unprecedented mechanical performance.

This review summarizes the emerging anti-icing gels and corresponding anti-icing mechanisms, and provides a future perspective.

Despite the remarkable advances in mitigating ice formation and accretion, however, no engineered anti-icing surfaces today can durably prevent frost formation, droplet freezing, and ice accretion in an economical and ecofriendly way. Herein, sustainable and low-cost electrolyte hydrogel (EH) surfaces are developed by infusing salted water into a hydrogel matrix for avoiding icing. The EH surfaces can both prevent ice/frost formation for an extremely long time and reduce ice adhesion strength to ultralow value (Pa-level) at a tunable temperature window down to −48.4 °C. Furthermore, ice can self-remove from the tilted EH surface within 10 s at −10 °C by self-gravity. As demonstrated by both molecular dynamic simulations and experiments, these extreme performances are attributed to the diffusion of ions to the interface between EH and ice. The sustainable anti-icing properties of EH can be maintained by replenishing in real-time with available ion sources, indicating the promising applications in offshore platforms and ships.

Molecular pulleys have been designed and fabricated to mitigate ice accretion.