Hydrogels present a great number of advantages, such as their swelling capacity or their capability to mimic tissues, which make them very interesting biomaterials. However, one of their main disadvantages is their lack of good mechanical properties, which could limit some of their applications. Several strategies have been carried out to develop hydrogels with enhanced mechanical properties, but many of the suggested synthetic pathways to improve this property are expensive and time consuming. In this work, we studied an easy synthetic path to produce tough hydrogels based on different maleic anhydride copolymers crosslinked with polyethylenglycol. The effect of the comonomers in the mechanical properties has been studied, their excellent mechanical properties, good swelling behavior and thermal stability being remarkable. In addition, in order to evaluate their possible applications as scaffolds or in wound healing applications, microsized fibers have been fabricated by electrospinning.

This study presents a novel green method for copolymerizing 1,3,5-trioxane (TOX) with ε caprolactone (CL). This technique uses Maghnite-H+ (Mag-H+) as a bulk green catalyst. Various techniques were used to confirm the structure of the resulting copolymer. The influencing factors on the copolymerization reaction were also studied. The results show that the best copolymer yield (46.3 %) was obtained via bulk copolymerization at a temperature of 353 K for a reaction time of 8 h.