Soft matter | EPFL Graph Search

Soft matter or soft condensed matter is a subfield of condensed matter comprising a variety of physical systems that are deformed or structurally altered by thermal or mechanical stress of the magnitude of thermal fluctuations. These materials share an important common feature in that predominant physical behaviors occur at an energy scale comparable with room temperature thermal energy (of order of kT), and that entropy is considered the dominant factor. At these temperatures, quantum aspects are generally unimportant. Soft materials include liquids, colloids, polymers, foams, gels, granular materials, liquid crystals, flesh, and a number of biomaterials. When soft materials interact favorably with surfaces, they become squashed without an external compressive force. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who has been called the "founding father of soft matter," received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1991 for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be

Nature-inspired Circular-economy Recycling (NaCRe) for Proteins

Simone Giaveri

Since a few decades our planet has been loaded with billion tons of synthetic polymer-based materials, commonly named plastics. The large scale of plastic production, associated with its limited recyclability, are the driving force for the accumulation of such materials into the environment. Garbage patches, i.e. islands of plastics in the ocean, are striking evidences of this issue. A sustainable handling, that is production and disposal, of synthetic polymer-based materials is one of the greatest challenges that humanity has to face.Proteins and nucleic acids are natural polymers. Arguably, Nature produces an amount of such polymers that is higher with respect to man-made polymers. However, these materials do not accumulate into the environment, that is the approach used by Nature to handle these polymers is sustainable. The secret for its sustainaibility lies on the circularity in the materialsâ use. Indeed, proteins and nucleic acids are sequence-defined polymers that undergo depolymerization to monomers, and recycling into new materials by reassembling the so obtained monomers into arbitrarily different sequences. Organisms digest proteins into amino acids. These monomers are in turn polymerized to produce the protein of need, at the time of the protein synthesis.In this thesis we show that this process is achievable outside living organisms. Indeed, we depolymerized structurally different short peptides, and peptides mixtures into their constitutive amino acids, and recycled such monomers into biotechnologically relevant proteins (green, and red fluorescent proteins), by using an amino acid-free cell-free transcription-translation system. We further applied our methodology to recycle proteins with high relevance in materials engineering such as Î²-lactoglobulin films, used for water filtration, or silk fibroin solutions into green fluorescent protein. We were also successful in recycling mixtures composed of short peptides, and technologically relevant proteins into fluorescent proteins, as well as into bioactive enzymes (catechol 2,3-dioxygenase). Finally, we achieved multiple cycles of recycling (two cycles), and we demonstrated that the strategy can be expanded beyond the set of the twenty proteinogenic amino acids.Presented herein is a nature-inspired approach to recycling of soft materials, where unknown mixtures of polymers are recycled into the polymer of need, by the local community, at the time of recycling. The materials are costantly transformed into different ones, without any external feed, and there is no way to distinguish a new polymer from a recycled one. The strength of this method lies in its compatibility with the principles of circular economy.

EPFL2021

Contact Mechanics for Hyperelastic Materials

Youssef Eddebbarh

Understanding the mechanical behavior of soft materials is of great importance for many applica-tions, especially for bioengineering and clinical applications. Hertzian theory is frequently used to characterize the mechanical properties of such materials. However, these materials undergo large deformations resulting in non-linear stress-strain response, which cannot be accurately captured by Hertzian contact. These materials are also rate sensitive, where at high velocities, external e˙ects such as air can influence the mechanical response. In this study, we experimentally in-vestigated the contact response of a soft spherical impactor on a rigid substrate and by using the principle of Total Internal reflection, we directly measured the contact radius. The e˙ects of specimen size, loading rate and boundary conditions were also examined and we found that, for the studied velocities, only the boundary conditions a˙ects both the radius-displacement and load-displacement relationships, leading to deviations from the theory at di˙erent indentation depths. We finished by setting up an experiment consisting of a pendulum for studying the e˙ects of high velocities and the influence air.

2021

Mechanical Reinforcement of Hydrogels through Physical Crosslinks and Double Network Granular Architecture

Alvaro Lino Boris Charlet

Throughout nature, organisms fabricate a myriad of materials to sustain their lifestyle. Many of the soft materials are composed of water-swollen networks of organic molecules, so-called hydrogels. They generally contribute to the mechanical integrity of the organism, and act as scaffolds for living cells. The ability to fabricate synthetic hydrogels that mimic their natural counterparts would greatly benefit the biomedical field. In particular, synthetic hydrogels have the potential to revolutionize tissue engineering and to enable the fabrication of functional load-bearing soft implants. However, available hydrogels suffer from poor mechanical properties, as they are either too brittle or too soft. While great effort in the field of soft matter has been devoted to the development of hydrogels with improved mechanical properties, they are often not compatible with state-of-the art manufacturing techniques such as additive manufacturing.In this thesis, I present the mechanical reinforcement of hydrogels using two distinctive strategies, and demonstrate their potential as 3D printable materials. I first investigate the use of high functionality crosslinks in metal-coordinated hydrogels. I show that this crosslinking strategy greatly improves the solid-like mechanical properties of viscoelastic gels. I then present the use of hydrogel microparticles to fabricate double network granular hydrogels. I discovered that these materials exhibit an extraordinarily high strength and toughness. Furthermore, the jammed microparticle precursor ink enables the extrusion and 3D printing of this material. This allows the fabrication of hydrogels with locally varying compositions, which can be utilized for example to design stimuli responsive materials. I leverage the granular structure to design recyclable double network granular hydrogels. This is achieved by forming a percolating network that has reversible covalent bonds. I show that this method can be extended to the fabrication of degradable hard plastics. Finally, I conclude by presenting the key findings, and I present a few possible follow-up ideas to further develop the field of load-bearing hydrogels.

EPFL2022