The tentative objective of this poster presentation is to cover two aspects of chemically crosslinked polyelectrolyte networks. In the first part we focus on the theoretical foundation of the volumetric properties of these systems, with particular emphasis on the discontinuous volume phase transitions that manifest under certain conditions. In the second part we investigate the transport properties of ionic and polyelectrolytic solutes in these systems, taking into consideration the hydrodynamic interaction between the network backbone and the solutes. The theoretical arguments presented are developed based on simulated data generated using molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo sampling, lattice Boltzmann, and computational fluid dynamics methods. An extended abstract will be available at http://homepages.cae.wisc.edu/~dyin/aiche2006/ prior to the conference.