Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Drawing inspiration from biological circulatory systems — such as blood vessels or the leaves on a tree — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers have worked on developing vascularized structural composites for more than a decade, creating materials that are lightweight and able to self-heal and self-cool.
But now, a team of Beckman researchers led by Sottos and Mayank Garg, postdoctoral research associate and lead author of the newly published Nature Communications paper, “Rapid Synchronized Fabrication of Vascularized Thermosets and Composites,” have shortened a two-day manufacturing process to approximately two minutes by harnessing frontal polymerization of readily available resins.