(72e) Bio-like Soft Materials with Life-like Intelligence
AIChE Annual Meeting
2023
2023 AIChE Annual Meeting
Materials Engineering and Sciences Division
Division Plenary: Materials Engineering & Sciences Division (Invited Talks)
Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - 10:00am to 10:30am
From the cellular level up to the body system level, living organisms present elegant designs to realize the desirable structures, properties and functions. For example, tendons and muscles are tough but soft, owing to highly complex hierarchical structures rarely found in synthetic materials. Our neuromuscular system enables our motion sensing and response with built-in feedback control, presenting superior intelligence also lacking in manmade systems. Gels, as a class of liquid-laden crosslinked polymer networks, not only have tissue-like water-rich porous networks and can also change their volume and physical properties in response to environmental cues. At UCLA He lab, we exploit fundamental material processing-structure-property-function studies of hydrogels and their derivatives, to create (i) âbio-likeâ structures and properties and (ii) âlife-likeâ intelligence in functional soft materials for applications in robotics, biomedicine, energy and environment. This talk will present how these could be realized by mastering polymer-water interactions. Specifically, using classic chemical physical principles to modulate macromolecule assembly up to complex polymer networks, the fundamental limits in mechanical, diffusion and electrical properties could be broken can be broken to design extreme properties. The enabled soft materials featuring high mechanical toughness, ion/electron conduction, fast stimuli response, and âsynthetic intelligenceâ make possible the next-generation energy-self-sufficient robots, personalized medical implants, as well as futuristic smart wearable electronics and battery-powered flight.