This award by the Biomaterials program in the Division of Materials Research to University of Colorado, Boulder, is co-funded by the Mechanics of Materials program in the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (ENG). Natural and human-made materials are often designed to perform the same functions, for example for structural support, robustness, protection, or being lightweight. Nature is therefore a significant source of inspiration for new and alternative designs for engineered materials, even for cutting-edge technologies such as flexible/stretchable electronics. Scaled skins in nature have remarkable mechanical properties including being compliant, resistant to penetration, and lightweight, all of which is achieved within an ultrathin membrane structure. This project will study the mechanics in scales and scaled skins in order to design and microfabricate a new bio-inspired material that can serve as a deformable, damage resistant, and robust protective coating. The resulting artificial scaled skins will be ultrathin, lightweight, transparent, and robust to mechanical deformations (puncture, bending, stretching, and compression) making them attractive for a wide range of applications. As part of these efforts, remote interactive sessions with the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) facilities at the University of Colorado will be developed and will be implemented in the high schools of rural communities in western Colorado.
The mechanical behavior of scaled skin makes it attractive for application as a protective coating on flexible and stretchable engineered materials, in which an 'engineered scaled skin' will be able to conformally cover the substrate throughout the applied deformations and provide resistance to puncture or excessive bending, twisting, or stretching. Modern designs and implementations of human-made scaled skins, although sharing some mechanisms and duplicating some performance features of natural materials, have not achieved a systematic biomimetic transfer-of-technology because of a limited understanding of the fundamental mechanics in such systems. The objective of this project is to design, fabricate, and characterize an engineered scaled skin material using an integrated set of experiments and novel multiscale computational methods. This project will lead to (i) design principles for artificial scaled skins with mechanics comparable to those observed in nature, (ii) microfabrication techniques to produce artificial scales and scaled skins from microscale structures, and (iii) direct measurements and computational modeling of the behavior of the artificial scaled skins in response to mechanical deformation. Artificial scaled skins will be uniquely positioned as an engineered material for coating and protecting flexible/stretchable electronic devices by providing enhanced mechanical properties, robustness and durability, and transparency, thus enabling application on specialized flexible electronics such as surface mounted tactile probes and implantable bio-sensors. These efforts provide a platform to attract and train engineers in the computational design of materials, microfabrication, and experimental/computational mechanics.
