Transcriber: Phuong Cao Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
There are things I can't force, I must adjust.
There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of viewpoint.
Let's talk about cake. I'm willing to bet that if
I gave everyone watching this your typical cake ingredients, your flour,
butter, sugar, what have you,
and no recipe that very few of you could successfully bake me a perfect cake.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong,
but my guess is some would come out really flat like a pancake
and maybe someone bubble over the top of the pan and I think we'd make
a big mess. So I want you to keep this idea of baking a cake without a recipe
on the back burner, and we're going to pivot for a minute
and we're going to talk about me.
I am Bailey Felix and I am
a senior bioengineering student here at Syracuse University.
Now, growing up has a pretty average kid, I played sports, but not all that well.
I play the violin. Definitely wouldn't call myself great,
but there is one thing that I really excelled at.
It was finding creative ways to hurt myself,
playing sports that would then stomp all my doctors.
So by the time I was 14, I was having knee surgery.
By the time I was 17, I was in
a back brace that went from my shoulder blades all
the way down to my tailbone can picture like a giant plastic corset.
And the route and the commonality in both of these problems was my doctors didn't
really know what was wrong or what to do.
So when I hurt my knee at swim practice and it swelled and I went to the doctor.
They did their imaging, they ran all their tests and they said,
I don't think anything's torn, I don't think anything's broken,
but clearly something's wrong because you can't walk.
So their only explanation and their only solution
for me was surgery at 14 years old.
Similarly, when I hurt my back, also at practice,
I go to the doctor and they say, I don't think you slipped a disc.
I don't think anything's torn. I don't think anything's broken.
But clearly, something's wrong because you went from
the able bodied athlete to not being able to pick up your backpack.
So their solution for me was a back brace, that giant plastic corset,
and to hope for the best. So being so young
and facing all of this really left me wondering if only someone had been doing
the research on what was wrong with me.
Maybe then I wouldn't be feeling so miserable right now.
And that led me to the path I'm going down now with bioengineering
and it really let this passion under me.
And I can stand here and tell you today that my passion is to revolutionize
the field of health care and medicine through the power of research.
And I think the team that I’ve been working with for the past few years
is starting to do just that.
I've been working at the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute under doctors
and Henderson working on 4D printing shape memory polymers.
And now I know that sounds super overwhelming. So let's back it up.
We’ll go back to cake. You’re thinking of has your flour, sugar, eggs, butter,
the cake I'm thinking of is made of a special material that we call
a shape memory polymer. Now,
what this means is it's a special material that has
the ability to be deformed and held into a temporary shape and then return to
and remember its original shape.
So picture this for me, something flat, like a piece of paper,
and you shine a spotlight on it,
you heat it up to a certain temperature and your flat sheet folds itself into
a cube or it folds itself into a flower.
Or imagine you have a hollow tube like a PVC pipe
and you shine your special light.
You heat it up to a certain temperature and that hollow tube shrinks down into
a fraction of the size. This is what makes our material so cool
and so special.
And it’s what gives us the fourth dimension to do 4D printing,
so if we were 3-D printing,
our product would be that 3D holo to like that PVC pipe.
But that fourth dimension comes in when your PVC pipe shrinks down to
a fraction of its size. That shape change over time.
Is the 4D that fourth dimension in 4D printing.
Now, I know that this can be kind of hard to visualize,
so I have a little clip here for you and you can watch in real time
the flat sheet curl itself into a tube.
So in seconds, you see a flat sheet of this special material.
Curl itself up on its own. And this is the special material for our cake.
So we have our ingredients,
but we can't just buy this material in
the way that we need to put it into our oven.
We have to do a little tampering with it first.
So when we buy this material, it comes in tiny little pellets.
You can imagine like the size of the beads,
you make friendship bracelets out of at summer camp and you can't put something
so small into our oven, which is a 3D printer.
So instead, we have to transform it,
melt it down and press it out into what you see on the right here,
which is a long filament of our special ingredient,
and this is the ingredient that goes into our special cake.
So we have our ingredients for this cake
and our oven I've mentioned is this 3D printer,
but the question that we have is how can we make
the perfect cake since we have no recipe?
Image you see, again, here on your right is
the cake that we are looking to make with our project.
The questions we have to answer to right in the recipe for this cake or how
the printing process or how the oven settings will change
the cake that comes out of the oven.
So we ask ourselves, how does
the temperature that we print our cake at impact its shape change?
So if I print my cake or a bake my cake at a higher temperature,
does that change its ability to change into a new shape
and return back to its original shape versus if I were to print that of
the lower temperature? We also ask,
how does the extrusion multiplier effect the cake that comes out of the oven?
Not the fancy way of saying if I'm piping my cake batter into the pan and
I squeeze my piping bag as hard as I can and it comes up a novel full thickness,
does that change the cake versus if I don't squeeze my batter quite as hard
and it only comes out of the nozzle at maybe ninety five percent in
the last parameter we had to ask ourselves about,
this is the fiber orientation's.
This means if I change the direction that I pour my cake batter into the pan,
will it change its ability to change shape and return to its original.
So if I were to print it in these long horizontal directions,
does that change its ability to change shape versus if I print on a diagonal
or if I print it in these little vertical directions?
And it turns out this one really does matter.
So we found that if we print our sample and we bake our cake piping
the batter into the pan in these long horizontal sweeps.
We get a better shape change than if we were to print it in the bottom shorter,
short segments. So at this point,
I think you’re probably all saying to yourself, OK, Bailey,
I get it cool polymer material, special material cake shape change. So what?
And there's really cool things that researchers are able to do with this
technology and with the special material,
you have researchers like Dr. Hanga who are creating self expandable cardiac
stents so that this means that they can create almost like that PVC pipe,
shrink it down to a fraction of its size and implant it in your body
and trigger it to return to its original size and open collapsed blood vessels
or blocked blood vessels. You also have researchers at the University of Colorado,
Denver, who are creating this hernia mesh out of the special material.
So one of the challenges with
the current hernia mesh is that it can be kind of sticky.
So to put it inside someone's body and get it in
the perfect spot isn't always the easiest of things.
But they've used the special material in a way where they can implanted into
the body and have it unravel itself and uncoil itself into the perfect spot.
So I stand here today to tell you
the really cool things that are now made more possible because of this research.
So this research has told us the the recipe for our perfect cake.
We know the ingredients, we have our oven,
and now we know how to put the two together and not compromise
the shape changeability that makes our material so special.
And I truly believe that this technology
and these developments are ones that we will all see in
the coming years in health care and medicine.
So I want to leave you here today with this. Who wants cake?