Additive Manufacturing of Soft, Smart Composites

该提案将侧重于开发生产具有感知和响应环境能力的柔软、适应性强的材料所需的制造工艺。我们专注于软材料，因为新兴的软机器人领域可以通过使用将金属，硬塑料和软橡胶结合在一个过程中的多材料增材制造来大大改善。软机器人有望通过开发可以在人类附近工作的协作和本质安全的机器人来改善自动化，制造，医疗设备和康复医学。在过去的10年里，软机器人作为一个领域已经爆炸式地流行起来，尽管许多使能技术，如增材制造，已经存在了更长的时间。我们的目标是进一步开发新型的增材制造，可以直接生产柔软，耐用和电活性的材料，最终可以复制或改善人体功能。这些智能和柔软的材料可以用于人造肌肉，皮肤般的压力传感器，空间位置意识和自我修复能力。 这项工作中使用的基本技术是一种多材料挤出机设计，我们最初为可拉伸电子产品的3D打印而开发。它结合了内部特征和外部进料机制，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坚硬到非常柔软，类似于骨骼通过中间硬度结缔组织粘合到柔软皮肤的方式。挤出机还允许我们直接打印中空壳纤维，或具有独立内部通道的长丝，可以填充油，液体金属和空气。因此，我们可以选择直接生产用于液压型人工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，或用于特别轻质和隔热部件的空气填充细丝。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使用该技术可以实现的设计规则和变化的基本发现流，而第二个研究流将基于特定设备，如人造肌肉，通过嵌入式液体电极感测软材料位置和变形，以及自修复结构。我们希望这项研究计划能够提供必要的材料构建模块，以在软机器人中产生真正的模仿人类的功能，这可能最终有助于增强人类的能力或与人合作，并最终为加拿大人提供巨大的经济和健康利益，这些人预计将成为我们人口中越来越多的受伤，残疾或年龄相关的流动性问题。

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.