“I think you’re on mute.” This was the most-used phrase of 2020, according to Human Resources Online. Emblazoned on T-shirts and embossed on coffee-mugs, we used the meme to make fun of ourselves while learning video-conferencing tools like Zoom and Microsoft’s Teams.
But for the more than 7 million Americans who suffer from vocal disorders, not being heard is a serious matter. Many people who have normal speaking skills have great difficulty communicating when their voice box, the larynx, fails. This can occur if the vocal cords, the two bands of smooth muscle tissue in the larynx, suffer damage from an accident, surgical procedure, viral infection or cancer.
There is no replacement for the vocal cords when the damage is severe or permanent. Now, a team of materials scientists at the University of Virginia School of Engineering has developed a soft material with promise of new treatments in the future. Their novel soft material, called an elastomer, is very stretchable and 10,000 times softer than a conventional rubber, matching the mechanical properties of vocal cords. The elastomer can be 3D printed for use in health care.
Liheng Cai, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and chemical engineering, oversees this research. Cai also holds a courtesy appointment in biomedical engineering and leads the Soft Biomatter Lab at UVA. Cai’s lab works to understand and control the interactions between active soft materials, such as responsive polymers or biological gels, and living systems, such as bacteria or cells and tissues in the human body.
Cai’s post-doctoral researcher Shifeng Nian and Ph.D. student Jinchang Zhu co-first authored the team’s paper, “Three-Dimensional Printable, Extremely Soft, Stretchable, and Reversible Elastomers from Molecular Architecture-Directed Assembly,” published and featured as a cover article in Chemistry of Materials and covered in Science magazine. Collaborators include Baoxing Xu, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UVA, who conducted simulations to understand the deformation of 3D-printed, extremely soft structures.
The team developed a novel strategy to make such 3D-printable soft elastomers. They used a new type of polymer with a special architecture reminiscent of the bottlebrush for cleaning small glassware, but on the molecular scale. The bottlebrush-like polymer, when linked to form a network, enables extremely soft materials mimicking biological tissues.
Cai began to prove the potential of bottlebrush polymers as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s John H. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Cai’s collaborative engineering of soft yet ‘dry’ rubber was published in Advanced Materials.
Now, Cai and his team have developed a new way to use strong – yet reversible depending upon the temperature – associations to crosslink bottlebrush-like polymers to form a rubber. The idea is to use chemical synthesis to append one glassy polymer to each end of a bottlebrush-like polymer. Such glassy polymers spontaneously self-organize to form nanoscale spheres that are the same as that of plastic water bottles. They are rigid at room temperature but melt at high temperature; this can be exploited to 3D print soft structures.
Their material’s elasticity can be fine-tuned from approximately 100 to 10,000 pascals on the scale of pressure the material can withstand. The lower limit, approximately 100 pascals, is a million times softer than plastics and 10,000 times softer than conventional 3D-printable elastomers. Moreover, they can be stretched up to 600%.
“Their extreme softness, stretchiness and thermostability bode well for future applications,” Cai said.