Additive Manufacturing of Soft, Smart Composites

柔软、智能复合材料的增材制造

• 批准号: RGPIN-2020-04603
• 负责人: Sameoto, Daniel
• 金额: $ 2.84万
• 依托单位: University of Alberta
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=760273
• 关键词: Additive; Manufacturing; Soft; Smart; Composites

This proposal will be focused on the development of the manufacturing processes required to produce soft, adaptable materials with the ability to sense and respond to the environment. We focus on soft materials because the emerging field of soft robotics can be greatly improved through the use of multi-material additive manufacturing that combines metals, hard plastics and soft rubbers in a single process. Soft robotics promise to improve automation, manufacturing, medical devices, and rehabilitative medicine through the development of collaborative and intrinsically safe robots that can work in close proximity to humans. Soft robotics as a field has exploded in popularity over the past 10 years, although many enabling technologies, such as additive manufacturing, have been around for much longer. We aim to further develop new types of additive manufacturing that can directly produce soft, durable, and electrically active materials that can eventually duplicate or improve on human function. These smart and soft materials can find use in artificial muscles, skin-like pressure sensors, awareness of position in space, and self-healing capabilities. The basic technology to be used in this work is a multi-material extruder design that we developed originally for 3D printing of stretchable electronics. It combines internal features and external feeding mechanisms to extrude multiple materials at the same time, bond different plastics together through mechanical interlocking, and vary mechanical properties from very stiff to extremely soft within a printed part, similar to the way that bone is bonded to soft skin via intermediate stiffness connective tissues. The extruder also allows us to directly print hollow shell fibers, or filaments with an independent internal channel that can be filled with oil, liquid metals, and air. We therefor have a choice of directly producing liquid filled channels for hydraulic type artificial muscle fibers, embedded electrodes for stress and strain sensors, or air filled filaments for exceptionally lightweight and thermally insulating parts. Because the manufacturing technology was recently invented by our group, the proposed research program will be based on streams of fundamental discovery on the design rules and variations that can be achieved with the use of this technology, while a second research stream will be based on specific devices such as artificial muscles, sensing of soft material position and deformation via embedded liquid electrodes, and self-healing structures. We expect this research program to provide the material building blocks necessary to produce true human mimicking functions in soft robots which may eventually help augment human abilities or collaborate with people and will ultimately provide enormous economic and health benefits to Canadians with injuries, disabilities, or age related mobility issues who are projected to be an increasing proportion of our population.

该提案将重点关注生产能够感知和响应环境的柔软、适应性强的材料所需的制造工艺的开发。我们专注于软材料，因为通过使用在单一工艺中结合金属、硬塑料和软橡胶的多材料增材制造，可以极大地改善新兴的软机器人领域。软机器人技术有望通过开发可以在人类附近工作的协作型本质安全型机器人来改善自动化、制造、医疗设备和康复医学。尽管增材制造等许多支持技术已经存在了更长时间，但软机器人作为一个领域在过去十年中迅速普及。我们的目标是进一步开发新型增材制造，可以直接生产柔软、耐用和电活性材料，最终可以复制或改善人类功能。这些智能而柔软的材料可用于人造肌肉、类皮肤压力传感器、空间位置感知和自我修复功能。 这项工作中使用的基本技术是多材料挤出机设计，该设计最初是为可拉伸电子产品的 3D 打印而开发的。它结合了内部功能和外部进料机制，可同时挤出多种材料，通过机械联锁将不同的塑料粘合在一起，并在打印部件内将机械性能从非常硬到极其柔软，类似于骨骼与软体粘合的方式皮肤通过中等硬度的结缔组织。挤出机还允许我们直接打印空心壳纤维，或具有独立内部通道的长丝，可以填充油、液态金属和空气。因此，我们可以选择直接生产用于液压型人造肌肉纤维的液体填充通道、用于应力和应变传感器的嵌入式电极或用于超轻且隔热部件的充气细丝。由于制造技术是我们小组最近发明的，因此拟议的研究计划将基于对设计规则和使用该技术可以实现的变化的基本发现流，而第二个研究流将基于特定的诸如人造肌肉、通过嵌入式液体电极感知软材料位置和变形以及自修复结构等设备。我们期望该研究计划能够提供在软机器人中产生真正的模仿人类功能所需的材料构建模块，这最终可能有助于增强人类能力或与人合作，并最终为受伤、残疾或年龄较大的加拿大人带来巨大的经济和健康效益预计这些人在我们人口中所占的比例将越来越大。