Metamaterials for medicine
Designing, manufacturing, and testing new metamaterials for medical devices, using polymers, composites, and metals. We look to control not just mechanical properties, but how properties evolve over time in response to phenomena such as material degradation, drug release, and mechanical fatigue.
Mechanics of metamaterials
Additive manufacturing offers enormous possibilities to produce metamaterials with unusual and exceptional mechanical behaviour, including energy absorbing, shape changing, and tunable stiffness materials. We aim to develop novel architectures for mechanical metamaterials based on design and material processing, and understand and predict their properties through multiscale modelling approaches.
Polymer biodegradation and recycling
Polymers are incredibly useful as engineering materials in applications as diverse as medical implants, packaging, and automotive components. Their usage has significant sustainability implications however, including usage of fossil fuels and accumulation of microplastic waste. Our work here includes optimising the bioresorption of medical polymers, and development of AI-enabled workflows for polymer upcycling into high-performance applications.
