Prof. Jérémy Odent will give a talk entitled "3D-Printed Soft Active Matter".
All are welcomed to join. Please register here (contact form) if you wish to attend the lecture.

Speaker : Prof. Jérémy Odent (Associate Professor, University of Mons, Belgium)

Abstract

Slowly yet steadily, additive manufacturing technologies have become a major player in the fabrication of polymeric devices with controlled architectures such as personalized prototypes, soft electronics, sensors and actuators as well as tissue and biomedical engineering. Based on a layer by layer fabrication, with resolution in the range of microto nanometers per layer, the computer-assisted printing significantly speeds up the development of custom 3D devices without actually inflating the costs. Despite the irrefutable progress made around 3D printing, the technique still suffers from rigid and static properties of the printed parts and lack of fabrication approaches controlling the material anisotropy. In light of these limitations, a breakthrough strategy towards designing anisotropy-encoded structures using commercial stereolithography technology is reported by means of controlling either the specific surface area to volume ratio, the crosslinking density or the chemical composition of discrete layers during fabrication.
The key element here is the time, where the actuation, the sensing and the programmability are directly embedded into the material structure and occur in desired time frames. The latest efforts along these lines involve a family of 3D-printed materials including (1) multi-responsive functionally graded hydrogel-based actuators capable of rapid, controllable motion in response to environmental parameters, (2) self-powered iontronic touch sensors which utilize touch-induced ionic charge separation in ionically conductive hydrogels, (3) structurally-colored composite elastomer exhibiting a stressdependent color change and high toughness using submicron-sized silica particles and arranging them in a periodic structure in the elastomer, (4) phenylboronic acid-containing implants with on-demand glucose-triggered drug release abilities for personalized medicine, and (5) cell-laden gelatin-based hydrogels of enhanced cell viability and biological functionality. This work represents a flexible platform for designing more advanced 3D-printed polymeric materials beyond the present studies that would promote new potential applications.

Please refer to the document below also:
Abstract and speaker's information

As for further information on the speaker, please visit the website below (University of Mons):
Prof. Jérémy Odent (Laboratory of Polymeric and Composite Materials, Center of Innovation and Research in Materials and Polymers, University of Mons)