This paper presents a comprehensive review of current advances and challenges in the field of bone tissue engineering. A systematic review of the literature was conducted to identify recent developments in biomaterials, scaffold design, cell sources, and growth factors for bone tissue engineering applications. Based on this review, an experimental proposal is presented for the development of porous composite biomaterials that may enhance bone regeneration, which consist of hybrid amyloid/spidroin fibers combined with a bioactive ceramic matrix. An iterative design process of modeling and simulation, production, and characterization of both the fibers and the composite material is proposed. A modeling and simulation approach is also presented for unidirectional fiber composite biomaterials using 2-point correlation functions, finite element simulations, and machine learning. This approach was demonstrated to enable the efficient and accurate prediction of the effective Young’s modulus of candidate composite biomaterials, which can inform the design of optimized materials for bone tissue engineering applications. The proposed experimental and simulation approaches have the potential to address current challenges and lead to the development of novel composite biomaterials that can augment the current technologies in the field of bone tissue engineering.
Computational materials is a field that utilizes modeling, simulations, and technology to study how materials behave. This honors thesis is a presentation discussing computational materials, our study of packing theory using the Monte Carlo (MC), and how our research can be related to real materials we use.
The significant drawback of currently widely-used fatigue analysis approaches, nevertheless, is that they are all cycle-based, limiting researchers from digging into sub-cycle regime and acquiring real-time fatigue behavior data. The missing of such data further impedes academia from validating hypotheses that are related to real-time observations of fatigue crack nucleation and growth, thus the existence of various phenomena, such as crack closure, remains controversial.
In this thesis, both classical stress-life approach and fracture-mechanics-based approach are utilized to study the fatigue behavior of alloys. Distinctive material characterization instruments are harnessed to help collect and interpret key data during fatigue crack growth. Specifically, an investigation on the sub-cycle fatigue crack growth behavior is enabled by in-situ SEM mechanical testing, and a non-uniform growth mechanism within one loading cycle is confirmed by direct observation as well as image interpretation. Predictions based on proposed experimental procedure and observations show good match with cycle-based data from references, which indicates the credibility of proposed methodology and model, as well as their capability of being applied to a wide range of materials.