CAREER: Layered Cooling Crystallization for Additive Manufacturing of Bioinspired Heterostructured Hybrid Materials

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research to investigate an innovative, cooling-assisted additive manufacturing (AM) approach for building bioinspired materials. By learning from nature's complex designs, bioinspired hybrid materials combine lightweight properties with exceptional strength, toughness, and impact resistance, making them ideal for applications in sports, biomedical engineering, and consumer electronics. Traditional bottom-up assembly and AM technologies face limitations in fabricating bioinspired materials with high ceramic loading, precise crystal size, and controlled distribution within polymer frameworks, which limit their functionality. This project addresses these challenges by developing a novel AM technique that integrates photo-induced polymerization and layered cooling crystallization to mimic biomineralization process. Success of this project will enable precise manufacturing of rigid materials in specific regions of polymer frame and enhance material functionality. Educational activities will engage students at all levels across the U.S. and prepare a highly skilled workforce. These efforts will strengthen the America’s talent pipeline, enhance public engagement, and equip future professionals to meet critical economic and societal challenges. This CAREER project aims to understand the processing mechanism of a new multi-material AM technique to produce dual-material properties using a single resin, eliminating post-processing while enhancing scalability and efficiency. The proposed research introduces a layered cooling crystallization AM approach to fabricate bioinspired hybrid materials by integrating programmable crystal growth within photopolymerized polymer frames. The project seeks to advance scientific comprehension of the intricate effect of cooling parameters (temperature, cooling time, and rate), resin chemistry (composition and supersaturation level), as well as bioinspired polymer patterns (structures, wettability, and roughness) on the nucleation, growth, crystallization dynamics and bonding of crystals during the layered cooling crystallization. Advanced simulations and experimental methods will elucidate the relationship between thermal fields, crystal growth kinetics, material properties, synergistic system integration, and resulting functionalities of the printed hybrid materials. By mimicking bio-growth processes through multi-material formation mechanisms, this approach will enhance design flexibility and lead to optimized manufacturing practices. The findings will provide a robust framework for designing multifunctional materials with applications in sports gear, smart protective devices, biomedical implants, and beyond, advancing both fundamental understanding and industrial capabilities in AM. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.