Dr Shoufeng Yang (University of Southampton)
Location: Stephenson Building, room F16 (first floor)
Time/Date: 1st November 2012, 16:00 - 17:00
The development of appropriate scaffolds has been one of the most important goals in the field of tissue engineering. In general, the scaffold must serve several functions: it must provide internal channels and pores for the attachment and migration of different cells; it must deliver various nutrition, growth factors and waste products; and it requires sufficient mechanical properties to maintain its shape during cell-growth and to endure environmental stresses after implantation in the human body. The problem of currently additive manufacturing technologies is that none of them are able to make one part with multiple materials to achieve multiple properties/functions in a complex system. In the last few years we have developed new additive manufacturing method by dry powder micro dispensing and fine lattice extrusion method, which has potential to build multiple materials tissue engineering scaffold. The dry powder dispensing method was inspired by ancient art –Tibet Monk’s sand painting, in which vibration is used to control the flow of powder through micro nozzles without mechanical valves. In this presentation, different vibration including music is used to demonstrate the control of the powders dispensing. Fine Tissue Engineering scaffold were built with 60 micron diameter of hydroxyapatite filament and variable pore size from 30 microns to a few hundreds microns.
Shoufeng Yang has a first degree in Mechanical Engineering and Ph.D in Materials Science both from Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has been working as post doctoral research fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Queen Mary, University of London. He was then appointed as EPSRC platform grant research fellow, RCUK academic fellow, and lecturer, and senior lecturer before he moved to University of Southampton at 2010. His main research interests are in the development of micro dispensing technologies for various materials and the use of these technologies for various applications. These technologies include innovative dry powder printing (for solids), ink jet printing (for liquids) and extrusion freeforming (for semisolids). The applications include high throughput and combinatorial materials discovery and second generation solid freeform fabrication (SFF), in which both the materials composition and the shape of objects are computer controlled throughout three dimensional space. This dry powder printer project was selected for the prestigious Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2007 (http://royalsociety.org/From-music-to-sand-painting/). His current research topics include tissue engineering scaffold fabrication, artificial neural networks (ANNs), metamaterials, combinatorial materials research, inkjet printing, pharmaceutical powder handling and dry powder printing. He has published more than 60 peer reviewed journal papers and 30 conference papers. His personal website could be found at http://www.soton.ac.uk/~sy1n09/ . He is founder, director and chief scientist of spin off company VaroDose Ltd.
Published: 25th October 2012