Improving Engineering Resilience via Bioinspired Living Material

The US infrastructure is continuously aging and failing during service or under unpredictable hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks. One of the NAE grand engineering challenges in the 21st century is to restore and improve urban infrastructure (www.engineeringchallenges.org/challenges/infrastructure.aspx). Living organisms typically exhibit extraordinary resilience to hazards, thus becoming continuous sources of inspiration for designing engineering materials and structures. Living organisms are typically different from engineering materials in two aspects: First, living organisms typically feature sophisticated microstructures and architectures that are challenging to reproduce in traditional engineering practice. Second, living organisms consist of living cells to support their metabolisms, such as growth, regeneration, and remodeling, which are typically impossible in traditional engineering materials. In this talk, we present the design of bioinspired living materials by integrating living components (e.g., living chemistry, microorganisms, and plants) into engineering materials using modern manufacturing technologies. The vision is that these bioinspired living structures can imitate both architectures and metabolisms of living organisms to enable self-growing, self-remodeling, self-strengthening, and self-healing in resistance to aging, fatigue, and natural hazards. For example, assisted by living chemistry, 3D-printed structures can self-heal large-scale impact damages and fractures. Assisted by living microorganisms, 3D-printed polymers can self-grow into structural composites with pre-designed delicate microstructures. Assisted by living chloroplasts, 3D-printed artificial trees can harness photosynthesis to self-remodel into multifunctional materials.

Qiming Wang is an Assistant Professor and endowed Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair at Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Southern California (USC). Before joining USC, he was a postdoctoral associate in Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014-2015) and earned his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering at Duke University in 2014. He received ONR Young Investigator Award (2021), NSF Faculty Early Career Award (2020), AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2018), SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (2020), Orange County Engineering Council Outstanding Young Engineer Award (2020), MRS Graduate Student Award (2014), ACS Arthur K. Doolittle Award (2014), Duke Kewaunee Student Achievement Award (2013), Duke Lew Pre-Doctoral Fellowship (2012), and ASME Best Paper Award (2011). His research interest is centered around manufacturing and mechanics of unprecedented materials and structures that can potentially address grand engineering challenges, including infrastructure, water, environment, energy, robotics, and healthcare. His recent research is to design and understand bioinspired living materials by integrating living components (e.g., living chemistry, microorganisms, and plants) into engineering materials using modern manufacturing technologies. His research has been widely reported by more than 200 news articles in popular media, such as Science highlights, Nature highlights, Discovery, Washington Post, NBC News, Wall Street Journal, Physics Today, Materials Today, and NASA Tech Briefs.