The demand for solutions in digital health, cellular materials and microsystems requires reconsidering how polymer materials are made and multiple functions as well as the time axis (e.g. the material’s ability to be adaptive and stimuli-responsive over its life cycle) properly integrated. Based on the 3DPartForm project’s motto “Material innovations arise from the way materials are made”, the project’s approach towards this goal is to come up with a novel design concept where polymer materials will be able to collect, process and release signals and information in a smart fashion. Most importantly, multimaterials will be designed such that one specific function can be triggered by multiple stimuli, and one specific stimulus can induce multiple functions. With that, 4D polymer materials will be obtained for the first time that are highly integrated, multifunctional, reprogrammable, scalable, and able to sense, guide and manipulate information. The basis for this approach are adaptive and stimuli-responsive, microscopic hydrogel particles that will be assembled into hierarchical systems based on additive manufacturing – metaphorically speaking in a LEGO®-like fashion. Thus, the project’s contribution to moving forward the state of the art in polymer materials design and processing methods will be manifold. Exemplarily, functionality of polymer materials will be embedded on the building block level to avoid elaborate, costly post processing. Further, by using building blocks that are not liquid as in established 3D printing methods based on polymer melts or resins but made of pre-polymerized particles, design flexibility and thus combinations of materials and functions is greatly enhanced opening up new possibilities in tailored material solutions, which will be a game changer for wearable materials, biomimetics, and artificial organ design.
The importance of the project for society lies in its broadness of applicability of the materials that can be developed by 3DPartForm’s unique combination of material basis and processing technology. Microgels have been chosen as building blocks due to their successful usage as platform for biosensing or as cell-like environment for cell-free protein synthesis and enzymatic cascades - all examples that have been explored by the PI’s research group. Building up hierarchical assemblies of such versatile building blocks will provide a path towards material composites or so-called cellular materials that make the jump to length scales that are significant for the important field of human-machine integration, intelligent biomedical systems, and hybrid tissue of artificial and natural entities, for instance. By implementing sensory molecules, nanoparticles and functional microgel building blocks, (bio-)chemical information and signals will be processable in such a complex, cross-scale environment and, in perspective, even provide the means to control system properties based on feedback loops. As a long-term perspective, the combination of cellular materials and sensing will form the basis for rational materials design and the development of biomedical systems that are optimally adapted to their environment and a user’s/patient’s needs.
