Additive Manufacturing of Biomechanically Tailored Meshes for Compliant Wearable and Implantable Devices

Additive manufacturing (AM) of medical devices such as orthopedic implants and hearing aids is highly attractive because of AM’s potential to match the complex form and mechanics of individual human bodies. Externally worn and implantable tissue-support devices, such as ankle or knee braces, and hernia repair mesh, offer a new opportunity for AM to mimic tissue-like mechanics and improve both patient outcomes and comfort. Here, it is demonstrated how explicit programming of the toolpath in an extrusion AM process can enable new, flexible mesh materials having digitally tailored mechanical properties and geometry. Meshes are fabricated by extrusion of thermoplastics, optionally with continuous fiber reinforcement, using a continuous toolpath that tailors the elasticity of unit cells of the mesh via incorporation of slack and modulation of filament-filament bonding. It is shown how the tensile mesh mechanics can be engineered to match the nonlinear response of muscle, incorporate printed mesh into an ankle brace with directionally specific inversion stiffness, and present further concepts for tailoring their 3D geometry for medical applications.Financial support was provided by a National Science Foundation Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability postdoctoral fellowship (Award number: 1415129) to S.W.P.; a Samsung Scholarship to J.L; the School of Engineering and Sciences from Tecnologico de Monterrey to R.R.; the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Department of Energy, UT-Batelle, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, the DOE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office to G.D.; the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to C.M.; and the Eric P. and Evelyn E. Newman Fund and NSF-CRCNS-1724135 to N.H

Wegner Estimate and Disorder Dependence for Alloy-Type Hamiltonians with Bounded Magnetic Potential

We consider non-ergodic magnetic random Sch\"odinger operators with a bounded magnetic vector potential. We prove an optimal Wegner estimate valid at all energies. The proof is an adaptation of the arguments from [Kle13], combined with a recent quantitative unique continuation estimate for eigenfunctions of elliptic operators from [BTV15]. This generalizes Klein's result to operators with a bounded magnetic vector potential. Moreover, we study the dependence of the Wegner-constant on the disorder parameter. In particular, we show that above the model-dependent threshold $E_0(\infty) \in (0, \infty]$, it is impossible that the Wegner-constant tends to zero if the disorder increases. This result is new even for the standard (ergodic) Anderson Hamiltonian with vanishing magnetic field

Women and telomeres

Last year, two eminent female scientists and mothers shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology. Howard Wolinsky explores how their field of telomerase research was shaped and what hope this award to two working mothers offers for other female scientists