Reece Oosterbeek

Reece’s research focuses on how the properties of materials evolve over long timescales, in applications such as biodegradable materials, and fatigue loading of medical implants. He is particularly interested in using additive manufacturing to design and build structures and materials with controllable time-dependent behaviour. His research is also directed towards polymer sustainability, including biodegradable polymers, and methods of improving polymer recycling using AI-informed workflows and advanced materials testing. The main research themes in Reece’s research group are: Metamaterials for medicine Designing, manufacturing, and testing new metamaterials for medical devices, using polymers, composites, and metals. We look to control not just mechanical properties, but how properties evolve over time in response to phenomena such as material degradation, drug release, and mechanical fatigue. Mechanics of metamaterials Additive manufacturing offers enormous possibilities to produce metamaterials with unusual and exceptional mechanical behaviour, including energy absorbing, shape changing, and tunable stiffness materials. We aim to develop novel architectures for mechanical metamaterials based on design and material processing, and understand and predict their properties through multiscale modelling approaches. Polymer biodegradation and recycling Polymers are incredibly useful as engineering materials in applications as diverse as medical implants, packaging, and automotive components. Their usage has significant sustainability implications however, including usage of fossil fuels and accumulation of microplastic waste. Our work here includes optimising the bioresorption of medical polymers, and development of AI-enabled workflows for polymer upcycling into high-performance applications.

Mechanics and modeling of hierarchically porous metamaterials manufactured by foaming fused deposition modeling Maximising data from small scale testing on irradiated material for fusion power Engineering of Bioresorbable Polymers for Tissue Engineering and Drug Delivery Applications The coupled effect of aspect ratio and strut micro-deformation mode on the mechanical properties of lattice structures Shear yielding and crazing in dry and wet amorphous PLA at body temperature