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, because we have existing hard matter emulators. There is no soft matter emulator because of a lack of 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.

+ We are designing for biomaterial assembly from the ground up, leveraging novel phase change triggers for protein self-assembly, and creating predictable performance outcomes.

+ Advances in micro and nano fluidics handling allows scaling and automation of fiber dope creation and characterization.

+ We can harness automation and robotics to develop repeatable and normalized processes at scale, enabling both digital twin and standardized characterization.

+ Newer spinning techniques, such as contact pulling, electro-spinning, and microfluidics can be scaled-out while maintaining the same biophysics, allowing for massive parallel distributed manufacturing and linear scaling.

+ Rapidly accelerating capabilities in protein design and protein production mean that proteins are now reliable feedstocks for manufacturing systems.

+ We will create 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.

+ We can create 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.

+ We will enable nanoscale material sesign 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.