CAREER: Measurement and Analysis of Osmosis-Mediated, Closed-cell Poroelastic Dynamics

该学院早期职业发展（Career）奖将描述在渗透驱动运动下闭孔流固复合材料的物理-化学-流体力学行为。植物王国在没有肌肉组织的帮助下安静而高效地生活着。尽管缺乏水分，植物还是可以利用水作为动力进行大规模甚至快速的运动。这些运动能够收集能量。该奖项支持使用这种渗透驱动的运动作为灵感的研究工作。在利用植物结构方面，这些努力产生的合成植物组织类似物将提供无毒、节能和量身定制的反应。同时，这种材料在水中使用时不需要连接到外部电源支架。这些水工建筑物的预期响应可以调整，以提供响应变化作为时间和位置的函数。诸如此类的反应对于许多组织疗法至关重要，并将通过在医疗保健和生物力学方面的应用造福社会。此外，该奖项支持的基础工作将丰富对植物水力响应的理解，这是详细气候模型的必要组成部分。此外，还将与伊利诺伊大学（University of Illinois）的一位英语教授合作，为体育营中的年轻女运动员开展STEM教育活动，并为科学报告建立交流/修辞方面的课外研讨会。研究小组将在现有的有限变形固体孔隙弹性理论的基础上，为这类目前未描述的材料开发一个本构模型。模型将通过人工合成的植物组织类似物的实验来获得信息，这些模拟物是为浸泡在水环境中时的均匀变形响应而设计的。作为最终模型的验证，动态和/或不均匀变形的体系结构复合材料将被设计和制造，目标是亚稳态、分层自组装结构。通过对这些材料的成功建模，这项工作将填补对植物组织中“水关系”理解的现有空白。具体来说，通过工程水-固复合材料控制材料和表面特性，这项工作将解决关于细胞间和细胞内水流途径及其对细胞内渗透和静水压力的依赖的持续争论。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will describe the physico-chemo-hydromechanical behavior of closed-cell fluid-solid composites under the regime of osmosis-driven motion. The plant kingdom quietly and efficiently goes about its life without the aid of muscle tissue. Despite this lack, plants can produce large and even rapid movements using water as the driving force. These movements enable energy harvesting. This award supports research efforts that use this osmosis-driven motion as inspiration. In leveraging plant architectures, the synthetic plant-tissue-analogs resulting from these efforts will provide a non-toxic, energy efficient, and tailored response. Simultaneously, such materials would require no connection to an external power support when used in water. The anticipated response of these hydraulic structures may be tuned to provide response variation as a function of both time and position. Responses such as these are essential for many tissue therapies and will benefit society via applications in healthcare and biomechanics. Further, the fundamental efforts supported by this award will enrich understanding of the hydraulic response of plants, a necessary component of detailed climate models. Educational activities for STEM outreach to young female athletes at sport camps will also be developed and extracurricular seminars on communication/rhetoric for scientific presentations will be established in collaboration with an English professor at the University of Illinois.The research team will develop a constitutive model for this currently undescribed class of materials by building on existing theories of poroelasticity for solids capable of finite deformation. Models will be informed by experiments on synthetic plant-tissue-analogs architected for a homogeneous deformation response when immersed in an aqueous environment. As validation of the final model, dynamically and/or inhomogeneously-deforming, architected composites will be designed and fabricated with an aim toward metastable, hierarchical self-assembled structures. In successfully modeling these materials, this work will fill an existing gap in the understanding of 'water relations' in plant tissue. Specifically, by controlling material and surface properties via engineered water-solid composites, this work will resolve an ongoing debate regarding inter- and intra-cellular water flow pathways and their dependence on the osmotic and hydrostatic pressure within the cells.