New materials from interdisciplinary innovation

Already widely recognized for innovative research to develop “self-healing” structural materials, an interdisciplinary research team published an article in the journal Advanced Materials detailing research on vascularized structural composites, creating materials that are lightweight and strong with potential for self-healing, self-cooling, metamaterials, and more.

Led by Scott White, a Willett Professor of Aerospace Engineering, the team includes Nancy Sottos, Paul Braun, and Jennifer Lewis, materials science; Jeffrey Moore, chemistry; Philippe Geubelle, aerospace; and Jonathan Freund and Kenneth Christensen, mechanical science and engineering; as well as many undergraduate and graduate students. The group works with novel materials in the interdisciplinary Autonomous Materials Research Laboratory at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

The team’s research is directed toward the creation of new materials systems that exhibit autonomy—an ability to achieve adaptation and response in an independent and automatic fashion.

Noting that the structural material is more than just another microfluidic device, Sottos said, “It’s capable of many functions that mimic biological systems. That’s a big jump.”

Those kinds of leaps are possible in part because the team works well together, building on individual strengths to be creative and productive. Their research has been selected for cover stories in Nature and several scientific journals over the past five years. This research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

“I want to work on projects that can make a significant impact on society. The concept of autonomic functionality in materials—a smart material—is very interesting to me,” said White. “It became clear to me that to achieve this goal I had to look beyond the borders of engineering. Yet, you can’t force interdisciplinary research, it begins from strong friendships.”