Eel ply’ fabrics: Fish skin as a biological textile model for new material design
Project Description
Marine biological materials provide a wealth of high-performing sources for inspiration: anti-fouling coatings, high toughness scaffolds, brilliant structural colors and self-healing threads. Fish scales, in particular, have offered much fodder for biomimicry, particularly heavily armored or fast-swimming species as inspiration for protective or hydrodynamic surfaces. Curiously, freshwater eels exhibit none of the most-mimicked anatomies, neither stout interlocking scutes nor scales closely overlapping like roof tiles. Eel scales, instead, have a unique scale morphology and arrangement, more like a cross-ply fabric than a scalation. We believe this drives the interesting mechanical properties of eel skin, particularly relevant for ‘non-crimp fabric’ designs and low-friction, dynamic shielding/coatings. In collaboration with biologist Prof. Mason Dean from City University of Hong Kong, this project leverages biology, materials and design approaches to characterize skin of local freshwater eels to develop an area of strength in biological tissue mechanics as a platform for biomimicked textiles, novel material discovery and translation.
Supervisor
SCHARFF, Rob Bernardus Nicolaas
Quota
2
Course type
UROP1000
UROP1100
UROP2100
UROP3100
UROP3200
UROP4100
Applicant's Roles
The collaborator Prof. Mason Dean will provide high-resolution, 3D, multi-scale characterizations of eel skin architecture using material science and bio-imaging tools and characterize eel skin structure-function links via performance mechanics and wear tests of eel skin.
The applicant's role will be to prototype and performance-test a family of bioinspired “eel-ply” fabrics, starting from bio-realistic eel-skin models and parametrically varying their design, producing proofs-of-concept for future applications. The applicant will deploy Rhino Grasshopper software for building a parametric CAD model of the eel-skin, and 3D-print the generated structures directly on fabric using state-of-the-art PolyJet or FDM additive manufacturing technology.
The applicant's role will be to prototype and performance-test a family of bioinspired “eel-ply” fabrics, starting from bio-realistic eel-skin models and parametrically varying their design, producing proofs-of-concept for future applications. The applicant will deploy Rhino Grasshopper software for building a parametric CAD model of the eel-skin, and 3D-print the generated structures directly on fabric using state-of-the-art PolyJet or FDM additive manufacturing technology.
Applicant's Learning Objectives
- Apply Rhino Grasshopper software to build parametric models
- Create materials with unique properties by 3D-printing directly on fabric using state-of-the-art PolyJet and FDM additive manufacturing technology
- Analyze the performance of a parametric family of bioinspired materials
- Create materials with unique properties by 3D-printing directly on fabric using state-of-the-art PolyJet and FDM additive manufacturing technology
- Analyze the performance of a parametric family of bioinspired materials
Complexity of the project
Moderate