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DIRECTED
ENERGY
PROFESSIONAL
SOCIETY
Abstract: 24-Systems-119
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UNCLASSIFIED, PUBLIC RELEASE
3D-Printing Anthropomorphic Phantom Models from Tissue-Equivalent Materials
Modern military operations, technology-driven war tactics, and ammunition necessitate the development of advanced body armor systems that attenuate and/or mitigate insults from kinetic and non-kinetic directed energy sources. Current blast-wave mitigation strategies are focused on using the deformation of body armor materials to absorb energy and can be both heavy and not designed to attenuate specific frequency ranges. Alternatively, metamaterial-based body armors can be tailored to attenuate stress wave propagation to cover full range of frequencies in linear and nonlinear regimes through their microstructure and dissipative properties. Moreover, textile-based electromagnetic shielding materials are being developed to counter radio-frequency threats. However, designing and demonstrating these new materials and geometries requires the fabrication of instrumented anthropomorphic phantom test beds with realistic morphologies and representative thermal, mechanical, and electromagnetic responses. A common approach for mimicking the properties of human tissues has been through the use of highly swollen polymer networks called hydrogels. While the material properties of hydrogels can be tuned to mimic those of human tissue through changes in water content, salinity, or the addition of nano-particle fillers, a significant challenge remains in structuring these materials into spatial complex geometries that capture the heterogeneity of biological tissue. Tissue equivalent hydrogels networks are cast in their fluid phases before undergoing a gelation, limiting the structural complexity of the resulting structure. Thus, new manufacturing methods are necessary for the fabrication of tissue equivalent hydrogels into multi-tissued anthropomorphic phantom models with realistic morphologies. Here, we present our progress in the application of embedded 3D-printing to manufacture full-size anthropomorphic phantom models from chemically crosslinkable polymer solutions. Embedded 3D-printing is a novel manufacturing process for soft materials that uses sacrificial support baths to provide mechanical stability to printed structures both during the printing process and throughout solidification. By tailoring the rheological properties of the support bath, polymer solutions can be printed in their fluid phase to generate structurally complex shapes that capture the structural heterogeneities of human tissue. As part of this effort, we design photo-crosslinkable polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) polymers and tune their mechanical, thermal, and electromagnetic properties to mimic those of the human brain. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability to generate geometrically complex structures that mimic human tissue from these polymers by 3D-printing polymer solutions into sacrificial support baths of packed granular hydrogel particles. This research represents our preliminary steps toward the manufacturing of multi-tissued anthropomorphic phantom models to evaluate the effects of non-ionizing radiation waveforms on biological systems and test metamaterial based mitigation strategies.
This work was supported by the Army Research Lab (ARL) under cooperative agreement W911NF-24-2-00931 (CHAInMAIL)
UNCLASSIFIED, PUBLIC RELEASE
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