Nature’s Way: Hierarchical Manufacturing with Biotic Composites

Industrial material production is responsible for over half of greenhouse gas emissions from industry which, coupled with biodiversity decline and depletion of critical resources, threatens the livelihood of current and future generations of both humans and non-human species. Conversely, the natural world manufactures enormous quantities of materials that can dramatically outperform human engineering while empowering, rather than degrading, the environment, by architecting simple and common building blocks in creative ways, tuning molecular composition, then nanoscale and macroscale geometries to derive highly specialized properties. This work proposes a new paradigm for materials design that achieves goals of sustainability by aligning and integrating models of material production with natural systems, utilizing modern computation and additive manufacturing technology while drawing source and inspiration from nature. We develop a library of 3D-printable functional composites from fully biotic and non-toxic building blocks, and characterize their mechanical, surface, and biodegradation characteristics. We moreover investigate the advantages afforded by additive manufacturing, including fabrication of hierarchical architectures similar to those found in nature. Finally, we explore strategies to further functionalize similar material platforms with computation-guided biocomposite optimization, generative microstructure design, and incorporation of living components for novel hybrid-living materials.