QRM: Understanding the Mechanical Design of Natural Cellular Materials via a Multiscale Quantitative Structural Representation

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Many biological materials systems, such as wood, bones, sponges, and sea urchins, utilize cellular structures for simultaneous mechanical function and weight saving. Similarly, engineering cellular solids with lightweight design and mechanical efficiency, have become increasingly favored for applications in energy, infrastructure, aerospace, biomedical, and the automotive vehicle industries. While many engineering cellular materials are manufactured to have either completely stochastic or periodic lattices, natural cellular materials often exhibit complex three-dimensional cellular designs with controlled structural morphologies at multiple length scales. This is believed to contribute to their remarkable mechanical robustness, especially considering their mechanically weak or soft constituents. This award will support a fundamental study to elucidate the multi-scale structural basis of the high-performance natural cellular materials, through an integrated multi-disciplinary effort involving materials science and engineering, mechanical engineering, computer vision, and data science. The insights gained from natural cellular materials will provide important guidance in the design and manufacturing of engineering cellular materials, deepen our understanding of structural cellular solids, and provide insights for the design and fabrication of advanced lightweight materials and structures, with potential benefits to US Manufacturing and Infrastructure sectors.This work will establish a quantitative, comprehensive, and efficient structural representation scheme for the multi-scale cellular network of highly porous structures found in natural systems. The researchers will study the bioceramic cellular structure of sea urchin spines as a testbed system, and multiscale structural representations will elucidate fundamental understanding of their remarkable mechanical robustness and damage tolerance. The work will address the challenges of representing complex, hierarchical cellular structures via three major innovations, including high-resolution tomography imaging and adaptive compressive data processing, multi-scale representation of the cellular structure (individual strut and node level, local unit-cell level, and global cellular network level), and in-silico "regrowth" of bio-inspired cellular structures with morphological control at multiple length scales. The research team will further validate the multi-level cellular structural representation through systematic finite element simulations coupled with synchrotron imaging-based in-situ mechanical testing.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.