Highly Robust Nanogels from Thermal-Responsive Nanoparticles with Controlled Swelling for Engineering Deployments.Regular nanogels have been demonstrated their inefficiency for subterranean oil recovery due to their intrinsic drawbacks of fast swelling within minutes, thermal instability, and salinity vulnerability.  To address the issues encountered during engineering deployment, hereinwe devised an integrative approach to in situ form swelling delayed robust nanogels by introducing radically active monomers with thermally sensitive moieties.  The nanoparticles with hydrophobic cores in brine in response to thermal input in situ generated well-dispersed hydrophilic nanogels, which showed a pronounced delayed swelling of a week compared to traditional nanogels showing swelling kinetics within minutes.  Furthermore, the formation of swelling-delayed nanogels could occur at ambient temperature.  In addition, the in-situ formed nanogels displayed long-term thermal stability and salinity tolerance under hostile media at temperatures up to 130 °C. 
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