I-Corps: ENERGY ABSORBING DEVICE MADE FROM LIQUID CRYSTAL ELASTOMER / NICKEL-TITANIUM SHAPE-MEMORY ALLOY (LCE/NITI) COMPOSITE MATERIAL

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the use of innovative approaches to create real-world energy-absorbing, customizable materials that may be tailored to a range of markets and applications that provide tangible societal benefits. For example, this new technology could help patients suffering degenerative spinal disc disease by adding material to replacement intervertebral discs. This application leads to reduced complication rates, improved shock absorption and biocompatibility, and overall increased patient satisfaction. The technology also provides a major public health benefit to athletes, the military, and others by providing superior energy dissipation in protective apparel. One such promising application is an additional lining material in football helmets to reduce the occurrence of concussions. Other potential fields include energy absorbing and vibration damping applications for the automotive or aerospace industries ranging from passenger safety and comfort to isolating critical electronic components in the event of impact, damage, and instability. Each of these applications aims to improve human health and safety, and represents billion dollars a year markets and hundreds of thousands of potential users. This I-Corps project will combine the complementary properties of liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) and nickel-titanium (NiTi) to create a unique composite material that has exceptional mechanical properties, and a high degree of tailorable behavior. Research into LCEs has proven they have excellent energy absorbing behavior and toughness, with performance exceeding that of most other rubber-like materials. However, typical polyurethane rubbers or silicones are inherently soft and/or have a slow recovery from large deformations; this limits its usefulness in many important situations. NiTi is the ideal material to compliment these shortcomings due to its own set of unique characteristics. Similar to metals, it is orders of magnitude stronger and stiffer than LCEs, but NiTi also undergoes shape-memory behavior that leads large recoverable deformation. Additionally, it also provides biasing stress to the LCEs that should greatly reduce the recovery time of the composite material. The combination of these unique and varied properties will give the composite material a level of customization and tailored behavior that is simply not achievable with any of the constituents independently and will be of interest from both a research perspective and attractive as a marketable product.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.