NSF CAREER Award to build tailored bio-like materials

Narasimha Boddeti, Berry Family Assistant Professor in WSU's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for his work using 3D printing to create and understand novel materials that combine solids and liquids.

Such unique materials could someday be used to mimic biological structures and tissue for biomedical engineering and soft robotics applications.

The prestigious five-year CAREER grants are intended to provide research support to young faculty beginning their careers who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.

As part of the approximately $600,000 award, Boddeti will use a novel 3D printing process to create soft architected materials that include liquid within a soft solid, similar to the way in which skin or other organs hold water within their soft structures.

Architected materials are materials designed with a tailored arrangement of one or more materials. The way that the materials are arranged means they can have engineered physical properties that are not easily available from their individual constituents.

"One kind of architected material is a soft composite that combines solids with liquids in a periodic fashion, and through this periodicity, you can access some interesting mechanical properties that you don't find in nature," he said. "It should be possible to create structures that are similar to biological tissues because our tissues are made of solids and liquid."

Boddeti aims to create materials that will be tunable and able to respond to stimuli in a variety of ways.

"This allows for the design of structures and devices that emulate the flexibility and toughness of biological matter - without their complexity - for biomedical, healthcare, and soft robotics applications," he said.

Some applications for such materials could include realistic organ models, energy absorbing structures, or flexible actuators or sensors.

As part of the project, Boddeti also aims to integrate computational science and engineering into mechanical engineering education and courses, which, he says, is an "increasingly critical component for all engineers and scientists."

Boddeti holds a Ph.D. from University of Colorado Boulder, and a B. Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Before joining WSU in 2020, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at Singapore University of Technology and Design's Digital Manufacturing and Design Center.

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