Scalable Synthesis and Manufacturing of Piezoelectric Biomaterials and Architectures

Piezoelectric materials are a group of important functional building blocks that interfacing the human body by coupling biomechanical energy and electricity. So far, many technology innovations have advanced piezoelectric materials and composites toward a broad range of biomedical applications, which possess unique biocompatibility and flexibility. Fundamentally, materials design and engineering draw the boundary where this technology may advance. In this talk, I introduce our most recent development of piezoelectric materials and composites that are particularly designed for implantable nanogenerator applications. First, I present our wafer-scale approach to creating piezoelectric biomaterial thin films based on γ glycine crystals. The self-assembled sandwich film structure enabled both strong piezoelectricity and largely improved flexibility. We will further discuss strategies of controlling the orientation and morphology of amino acid crystals to improve the piezoelectricity. Then, new ferroelectric composites are presented as a new composite used in 3D printing for directly manufacturing of piezoelectric architectures with tunable piezoelectric and mechanical properties. This group of materials enable new capability of in vivo charging and electrostimulations, which revolutionaries the design and implementation of many biomedical therapeutics.