Guest Speaker: Dr ZHAI Wei
Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore
Dr Zhai received her B.Eng. degree from the University of Science and Technology Beijing in 2011 and her Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge in 2015. She worked as a Research Scientist at the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology, A*STAR, from 2015 to 2019. Her research group at NUS currently focuses on developing multiscale manufacturing technologies, such as additive manufacturing and freeze casting, for multifunctional materials, including lattice structures, hydrogels, and composites. Since joining NUS in 2019, her team has published articles in journals, including Science Advances, Advanced Materials, Materials Today, Advanced Functional Materials, Acta Materialia, ACS Nano, Materials Horizons, etc.
Abstract
The development of advanced multifunctional materials has become increasingly crucial to meet the growing demands across various industries. Nature has been an abundant source of inspiration for highly intelligent and mechanically efficient materials, which have undergone millions of years of evolution and natural selection to achieve their complex yet ordered hierarchical structures. With the advent of advanced manufacturing, such as additive manufacturing and freeze casting, advanced materials can now be designed and manufactured with arbitrary designs not only in the macroscale, but also across multiple length scales ranging from nano-, micro- to macroscales.
In this talk, I will introduce our work on additive manufacturing of multifunctional lattice structures, emulsion direct ink writing of hierarchical porous materials and their applications, multi-scale freeze casting for tough hydrogels and their applications. These examples demonstrate the potential of multiscale manufacturing in creating hierarchical materials endowed with highly desirable multifunctional properties suitable for a wide array of applications.
