Living Foundries
Abstract
The goal of Living Foundries is to create a revolutionary, biologically-based manufacturing platform to provide new materials, capabilities, and manufacturing paradigms for the DoD and the Nation. With its ability to perform complex chemistries, be flexibly programmed through DNA code, scale, adapt to changing environments and self-repair, biology represents one of the most powerful manufacturing platforms known. However, the DoD's ability to harness this platform is rudimentary. Living Foundries seeks to develop the tools, technologies, and methodologies to transform biology into an engineering practice, speeding the biological design-build-test cycle and expanding the complexity of systems that can be engineered. The program will enable the rapid and scalable development of previously unattainable technologies and products (i.e., those that cannot be accessed using known, synthetic mechanisms), leveraging biology to solve challenges associated with production of new materials (e.g., flouropolymers, enzymes, lubricants, coatings and materials for harsh environments), novel functions (e.g., self-repairing and self-regenerating systems), biological reporting systems, and therapeutics to enable new solutions and enhancements to military needs and capabilities. Ultimately, Living Foundries aims to provide game-changing manufacturing paradigms for the DoD, enabling distributed, adaptable, on-demand production of critical and high-value materials, devices, and capabilities in the field or on base. Such a capability will decrease the DoD's dependence on tenuous material supply chains vulnerable to political change, targeted attack, or environmental accident. Research thrusts will focus on the development and demonstration of open technology platforms, or bioproduction pipelines, that integrate the tools and capabilities developed in PE 0601101E, TRS-01 to prove out capabilities for rapid (months vs. service-oriented architecture years) design and construction of new bio-production systems for novel materials. The result will be an integrated, modular infrastructure across the areas of design, fabrication, debugging, analysis, optimization, and validation -- spanning the entire development life-cycle and enabling the ability to rapidly assess and improve designs. Integrated processes developed in this program will translate into significant performance improvements and cost savings for the production of advanced materials, biological reporting systems, and therapeutics. These technologies will ultimately result in point-of-use, on-demand, customizable, and distributed production of strategic materials and systems. Key to success will be tight coupling of computational design, fabrication of systems, debugging using multiple characterization data types, analysis, and further development such that iterative design and experimentation will be accurate, efficient and controlled. Demonstration platforms will be challenged to build a variety of military-relevant and complex materials and functionalities, such as synthesis of advanced, functional chemicals and polymers (e.g., those tolerant of harsh environments), production of bio-reporting systems, or rapid and dynamic prevention, identification, and repair of corrosion/materials degradation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2014
- Source ID
- 949d5ceda85757fee6820da34ee90911