UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #1044

Overall Research Project Description Cellulose is one of the major components in plant cell walls, primarily in that of wood, playing a critical role analogous to scaffolding steels in concrete, maintaining plant cells’ mechanical properties. Human beings have been utilizing wood since the primary stage of civilization, however, until now our ways of using wood materials are not much different from our ancestors, mostly relying on macroscopic materials processing, such as cutting, drilling, lathing, and assembling, etc. The fundamental difficulty lies in that cellulose cannot be melted as can be done for metals and dissolved as for synthetic polymers, which significantly limits its processability.

Paper wasps are nature-born masters of material engineering and architecture. They use wood to build their nests in a completely different way: paper wasps peel off wood fibers using their mouthparts; chew the fibers with the presence of saliva, and bit by bit build their nests with the pulp. The entire process resembles 3D printing in modern technology, apart from the fact that the starting material is wood, which has never been processed in such a creative way.

We will employ the principle of biomimetics, aiming at learning from how paper wasps make nests; examining hierarchical structures of their nest material (from macroscopic down to atomic scale); developing eutectic mixture solvents mimicking paper wasp saliva; and printing 3D objects using cellulose pulp. This is interdisciplinary research combining chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, and entomology. Close collaboration with entomologist at FAMU will be conducted throughout the project.