The No Jargon Brief

Our Heilmeier Catechism

What are you trying to do?

+ Create programmable fibers

+ Unlock extreme fiber performance

+ Unlock competitive distributed manufacturing of sustainable fibers

+ Existing manufacturing technologies are black box bespoke input and output with little tunability and no predictable programmable outcomes.

+ Recent advances in materials identification harnessing AI is primarily in hard or crystal materials. This is due to the existing hard matter emulators - yet there is no soft matter emulator - this is because of a gap in data around soft matter.

+ Existing manufacturing technologies for fibers were designed for cellulose or plastics, and don't allow the necessary conditions for assembly of protein materials with performance.

+ Existing scaling is done with large jumps in volume processing, which changes biophysics and production - leading to total change in product output.

+ Leverage novel phase change triggers for protein self-assembly, and predictable performance outcomes - using contact pulling, electro-spinning, and microfluidics.

+ Harness fluidics handling designed for drug development for characterization of fiber dope characterization

+ Automation and robotics enable repeatable and normalized processes at scale, enabling both digital twin and standardized characterization.

+ Scale-out capabilities allow for massive parallel distributed manufacturing and linear scaling rather than jump scales.

+ Take advantage of rapidly accellerating capabilities in protein design, and synthetic biology for protein production as entry points to manufacturing systems.

+ Predictable Composite Materials with associated techno-economic analysis of cost and performance outcomes for input ingredients, providing evidence for resource allocation and funding of specific applications in textiles, aerospace, biomedical, space missions, remote facilities manufacturing, and robotics.

+ Spatial Gradient Fibers and materials that can be designed for vibration damping, increased force and shear tolerance and reduced fracture in joining dissimilar materials leading to low vibration applications, increased dexterity in biomedical and robotic applications, increased strength and degrees of freedom for robotics, artificial tendons, artificial muscles.

+ Nanoscale Material Design and Rapid Assembly for optical, electrical, and computational fibers. Examples of this include fibers tuned to biological mechanical characteristics, but also to enable electrical conduction from nervous system to computer interface.