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Bioinspired Materials with Self‐Adaptable Mechanical Properties

Submitted by santiago.orrego on
research

Dear iMechanica,

We are very excited to share the news that our recent work on bioinspired materials with self‐adaptable mechanical properties is published in Advanced Materials.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.201906970

The work was done in collaboration with Prof. Kang from Johns Hopkins University

We utilized piezoelectric charges as a mineralization mechanism. We harnessed this concept to create a material that can adjust its mechanical properties in response to external load…. similar to bone. The more  force you put into the material, the stiffer it becomes.

Kudos to all the team members who worked on the project, colleagues who gave kind encouragement and helpful comments, and the Air Force, Johns Hopkins and Temple University

Lixiang Yang

Hello Dear All,

    Thank you for sharing your interesting work. I am trying to understand your paper.  Can I ask you a question?

    You mentioned bone gets stiffer under external loading. Will mineral substance inside bone change under external loading? How?  In your experiments, is there an assumption that bone is tested as  the piezoelectric beam?  Is Young's modulus change of piezoelectric beam or bone related to more mineral substance on the beam surface or inside?

Thank you very much.

Lixiang

Mon, 05/04/2020 - 02:22 Permalink
santiago.orrego

Dear Lixiang,

Thank you for your interesting question, and for reading our work.

Yes, bone becomes stiffer with increase of external load. The general principles of bone adaptation to mechanical stress apply to both cortical and trabecular bone. The law that describes this behavoir is called Wolf's Law. Bone remodels on regions of high mechanical stress. Clinically, this has been observed as increased in BMD.

In our experiments, we did not test bone samples. We used a piezoelectric polymer serving as scaffold that generated signal (charges) for mineral formation. We showed that the higher electrical charged at the surface (produce by higher external mechanical load) the more mineral will form.  The change of modulus occurrs due tto the increased formation of mineral in proportion to the external force.

 

Feel free to let us know whether you have additional comments/questions.

Stay well,
Santiago

Mon, 05/04/2020 - 23:10 Permalink
Lixiang Yang

Dear Santiago,

   Wonderful idea. Thank you very much for the detail answer. I don't have further questions.

 

Best Regards,

Lixiang

Tue, 05/05/2020 - 13:58 Permalink