Design and fabrication tools for advanced materials: applications in biomechanics and mechanobiology

The demanding requirements for new materials and structures in engineering, medicine, and robotics have pushed scientists to find novel strategies to develop advanced materials able to meet challenging goals such as adaptability, responsiveness, and multifunctionality. In analogy with biological materials, these characteristics could be introduced into synthetic systems by a fine-tuning of composition, structure, and material properties over multiple length scales. New additive manufacturing technologies are allowing the fabrication of functional components with peculiar internal architectures and material properties that are able to rearrange when triggered by external stimuli (i.e., responsive materials). One future challenge is to develop adaptive materials, i.e., materials able to generate internal stimulation and respond to it (in analogy with the mechano-responsiveness of bones). The combination of new manufacturing routes, with artificial intelligence tools and mechanobiological concepts, can have disruptive results in terms of generating new responsive or adaptive materials, as well as optimizing existing mechanical systems in a large number of fields, also contributing to widely expand the design space.

This Research Topic aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the most recent progress for developing advanced materials appliable in biomechanics and mechanobiology. From new manufacturing technologies (e.g., 4D printing) to modeling tools, potentially powered by Artificial Intelligence, we welcome all the studies that can contribute to investigating biological or bioinspired materials for applications including, but not limited to robotic devices, (micro)prosthetics, mechanical augmentation, and sensing. This Research Topic also aims at reviewing open issues, offering new perspectives, and research avenues that may exploit interdisciplinary synergies offered by the combination of advanced manufacturing routes with digital strategies.

We encourage contributors to submit their most recent findings and studies under the form of Original Research, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, and Perspectives on the following themes:
• Artificial Intelligence as a new design paradigm and optimization tool
• Synergies between Artificial Intelligence and Additive Manufacturing for smart materials
• 3D- and 4D-printing to fabricate multifunctional devices for biomedicine and robotics
• Bioinspired and biomimetic materials
• Biomedical devices and prostheses
• Computational modeling for mechanobiology and biomechanics