A novel and simple strategy was designed for the synthesis of an unmodified gum arabic (GA) and acrylic acid (AA) based polymer hydrogels using Fe³⁺ as a physical cross-linking agent. The hydrogels showed a high mechanical strength, self-sustainability and self-healing ability, which depends on the content of GA and Fe³⁺ in the composition. The fracture stress increased from 0.23 to 0.841 MPa and a decrease in self-healing from 53 to 34% was observed by increasing the GA amount from 12 to 50% respectively. The self-healing performance of the hydrogels enhanced with the existence of the Fe³⁺ amount on the interface. Therefore, the 3% addition of Fe³⁺, increased the self-healing ability of up to 70%. Furthermore, the hydrogels also showed an excellent fatigue resistance up to 20 cycles without any rapture and can beard a load of 2.5 kg for a very long time. After 4 min of resting time, the percent recovery in dissipated energy reaching a high value of 95%, indicating the excellent fatigue resistance performance of the hydrogels. The hydrogels contain 3–5% of water at normal conditions and confirm its environmental stability. This work provides a new direction for the synthesis of unmodified GA based physically cross-linked polymer hydrogels systems and can be applied in bioengineering and robotic science in the future.

设计了一种新颖，简单的策略，使用Fe ³⁺作为物理交联剂，合成未改性的阿拉伯树胶（GA）和丙烯酸（AA）基聚合物水凝胶。水凝胶显示出高的机械强度，自维持性和自修复能力，这取决于组合物中GA和Fe ³⁺的含量。通过将GA量分别从12％增加到50％，可以看到断裂应力从0.23 MPa增加到0.841 MPa，并且自愈性能从53％降低到34％。Fe ³⁺在界面上的存在增强了水凝胶的自愈性能。因此，添加3％的Fe ³⁺，将自我修复能力提高了70％。此外，水凝胶还显示出优异的耐疲劳性，最多20次循环而没有被提，并且在很长一段时间内承受2.5 kg的载荷。静置4分钟后，耗散能量的恢复百分比达到95％的高值，表明水凝胶具有出色的抗疲劳性能。在正常条件下，水凝胶包含3–5％的水，并确认其环境稳定性。这项工作为合成未修饰的基于GA的物理交联聚合物水凝胶系统提供了新的方向，并且可以在未来的生物工程和机器人科学中应用。