New smart actuating material properties investigated under BioWings project

BioWings is a project funded by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 framework, under the Future Emerging Technologies (FET) Open programme.

Starting in June 2018 and for the following 48 months of activities, seven European partners will collaborate to investigate the unique properties of a completely new class of smart actuating materials and facilitate the integration in biocompatible MEMS.

BioWings’ main goal is to study, understand and implement a new class of smart actuating materials, based on highly defective cerium oxides, which recently displayed unique properties:

● non-toxicity and environmentally friendliness, unlike the current lead-based actuators;

● exceptionally high and still uncapped electrostrictive response under moderate electric fields, enabling low power consumption devices;

● full compatibility with silicon-based technologies and many other substrates, including metals and polymers.  

The project will bring the technology to TRL4, preparing the ground for the industrialisation of a new class of “biomedical MEMS” with increasing geometrical and functional complexity, suitable for a large variety of implantable and/or diagnostic applications.

Moreover, the results will be demonstrated in real biomedical applications: ultrasonic generation (MHz) in microprobes and blood cell sorting for bacteria separation and hematocrit level (HCT) estimation.

This four-year project comprises teams from Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Israel and Italy:

● Technical University of Denmark;

● Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL);

● Lund University;

● Weizmann Institute of Science;

● AcouSort.