Addressing the Complexity of Biomaterials by Means of Biomimetic Computer Aided Design

Abstract

The degree of optimization achieved by biological materials and their very special properties, their hierarchical designs and their multi-scale structures, continue to be great sources of inspiration for engineers and materials scientists world-wide. Fortunately, the development, in the last decades, of advanced computer-aided design, engineering and manufacturing technologies and the groundbreaking manufacturing paradigm consequence of the advent of additive manufacturing technologies, which enable solid free-form fabrication, have provided extremely relevant resources for the development of new knowledge-based multifunctional materials following biomimetic approaches for enhanced performance. This chapter covers some of the new design and manufacturing strategies that promote biomimicry and their advantages will be also put forward by means of several cases of study included in the following chapters, linked to the complete development process of tissue engineering scaffolds, organs-on-chips and other microfluidic biomedical devices benefiting from bioinspired designs. Section 6.1 introduces the term biomaterial and compares it to the concept of biological material, also detailing main differences between synthetic and biological materials, which constitute challenges as well as sources of inspiration for materials scientists and engineers. Sections 6.2 and 6.3 cover different strategies for obtaining biomimetic designs using the information from imaging techniques as principal input, while Sects. 6.4 and 6.5 detail procedures based on direct modeling by means of advanced computer-aided design, recursive and Boolean operations and models based on precise mathematical descriptions of living organisms, tissues and biological structures.