Researchers at the University of Bath are part of a new £50 million programme from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) that aims to develop scalable manufacturing processes that use proteins to build advanced inorganic and composite materials.
Many of the technologies society relies on, from renewable energy systems to communications networks, depend on advanced materials. A major challenge for researchers is developing materials that are lighter, stronger, more efficient and longer lasting, while also being affordable and practical to manufacture at scale.
Today's manufacturing methods often force a trade-off between precision and scale. While highly precise processes can create technologies such as microchips, they are generally expensive, energy-intensive and difficult to scale up. By contrast, biology routinely creates complex materials such as bone, seashells and sponge glass from locally abundant ingredients at room temperature.
Through the programme, 11 research teams will tackle one of the major emerging challenges in materials science: the 'protein assembly problem'. They will be split across three engineering challenges, each focused on developing a protein-based material for a product that industry currently cannot manufacture at the required performance or scale.
The University of Bath, in collaboration with Tufts University in the US, is participating in the '1D Challenge', which focuses on fabricating hollow-core optical fibres from silk-derived proteins. A £5.4M ARIA grant for the HollowSilk project will be shared by the two institutions.
The Centre for Photonics at the University of Bath is a world leader in optical fibre fabrication, making it well placed to explore this new approach.
Next gen optical fibres
Optical fibres are hair-thin strands made from glass used to transmit light and underpin technologies ranging from telecommunications networks and sensors to medical imaging devices.
Unlike conventional optical fibres, which guide light through solid glass, hollow-core fibres carry light through a tiny air-filled channel. They can offer faster transmission and improved performance for communications, sensing and laser applications. However, manufacturing hollow-core optical fibres is energy-intensive and can be difficult to scale.
ARIA’s Universal Fabricators programme, led by Programme Director Ivan Jayapurna, aims to overcome a longstanding manufacturing challenge: how to produce highly precise materials without sacrificing the ability to make them at scale. Researchers will investigate whether proteins can be programmed to assemble themselves into larger structures.
Finding ways to make new materials scalable
ARIA has three goals: to solve the protein assembly problem, to create advanced inorganic materials that outperform current manufacturing approaches, and to demonstrate pathways towards scalable industrial production.
Self-assembly is the process by which biological molecules automatically organise themselves into larger, ordered structures. Silk is a naturally occurring protein with the ability to self-assemble, making it an attractive starting point for exploring new manufacturing approaches.
Dr Rox Middleton, from the Department of Physics at the University of Bath and co-investigator in the silk study, said: "Bath is so much the right place to be bringing biomaterials into optical fibre fabrication, and we are delighted to be working with the team at Tufts. Along with the team and other creators at ARIA, this project feels like the perfect opportunity to make exciting things happen."
The project will explore whether biological self-assembly can offer a lower-energy alternative to conventional optical fibre fabrication processes.
Dr Middleton said: " This would be an entirely new way to produce functional microscale optical materials. We'd aim to reproduce what can be done with existing processes but develop techniques relying on biological materials, and to reduce or eliminate energy-intensive processes.”
While the immediate focus is on optical fibres, the team believes the implications could extend much further. It is hoped that the principles explored in the project could eventually be used to create a much wider range of materials through biologically guided self-assembly.
Professor William Wadsworth, also from the Department of Physics at Bath and HollowSilk principal investigator, said: "This is about more than making more optical fibres. Instead of top-down fabrication, we’re trying to understand how we can use nature's natural structures and modify them to encode shapes for glass structures that grow and assemble themselves.
"The exciting horizon is being able to modify proteins so they act as templates, guiding the formation of materials with precisely designed structures at the micron scale."
The project forms part of ARIA's broader effort to explore whether proteins could become scalable manufacturing tools, making it possible to create advanced materials in entirely new ways.
The HollowSilk team on this project is led from the Department of Physics at the University of Bath by Professor William Wadsworth with Dr Rox Middleton and Dr Soraya Caixeiro, in collaboration with Tufts University and Refactored Science. For this project, the Bath team will be recruiting a technical lead as well as another early career researcher and technician.