One of bone’s unique properties is its strength. Despite being built from spongy collagen protein and hard hydroxyapatite minerals, bone’s blended composition makes it incredibly well-suited to supporting heavy loads, something we all have good reason to be grateful for.
In a paper published in Advance Functional Materials, MIT civil engineering professor Markus Buehler details how his team created a synthetic bone material made from two separate polymers.
As part of his research, Buehler 3D-printed a number of synthetic composite materials with properties that mirrored both natural and man-made specimens. According to Buehler, "The geometric patterns we used in the synthetic materials are based on those seen in natural materials like bone or nacre, but also include new designs that do not exist in nature,"
In the end, the MIT team created three materials. The first material simulated the mineral calcite, the second material mimicked nacre, and the third was a composite design that was built to improve upon the structure of human bone.
After a number of stress tests, researchers found that their newly created bone material proved to be the most fracture resistant.
While we’re unlikely to see Buehler’s synthetic bone material being used anytime soon, one of his fellow researchers underscored the importance of this development. “As engineers, we are no longer limited to the natural patterns. We can design our own, which may perform even better than the ones that already exist."
Image Courtesy of Graham Bratzel