Steven Kurtz
Drexel University, PA·Biomedical Engineering
When surgeons repair complex fractures or rebuild bone lost to trauma or cancer, they use plates and screws to hold the skeleton steady while it heals. Most of these implants are metal.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Materials Science
Engineering
- Topics
orthopedic implants
bone repair
fracture fixation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Develop and optimize a hybrid additive manufacturing process for carbon-fiber-reinforced polyaryletherketones, combining 3D printing with heat-and-pressure consolidation, using design of experiments.
- Characterize printed and consolidated specimens and trauma-plate surrogates for chemistry, crystal structure, porosity, microstructure and mechanical performance.
- Build a multi-scale finite element model predicting thermal history, crystallinity and porosity, and use it to train Gaussian Process Regression and neural network surrogates for inverse design of manufacturing settings.
- Assess implant durability through accelerated hydrothermal aging, repeated steam sterilization and lipid exposure, combined with diffusion-based modeling.
More about the research
Metal is strong, but much stiffer than bone, can interfere with medical imaging, and is costly to make in patient-specific shapes. Implants made from high-strength polymers reinforced with carbon fiber could be lighter and more bone-like. However, they are hard to manufacture reliably and affordably, which has slowed their use in clinics.
Why it matters
Reliable, affordable manufacturing of carbon-fiber polymer implants could give trauma and bone-cancer patients lighter, more bone-like plates and screws. These implants would not interfere with imaging the way metal does, which could improve recovery and quality of life. The process-structure-property methods could also transfer to other composites used in aerospace and energy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Gregory Odegard
Michigan Technological University, MI·Materials Science
Use molecular dynamics simulations to measure how polymer chains mix, crystallize and build up stress at interfaces between carbon fiber layers. Simulate conditions from automated fiber placement, induction welding and stamp forming.
Xiangyang Dong
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Engineering·Early-career
Determine how pressure and viscosity control how liquid soaks into carbon fiber networks during coextrusion 3D printing of structural battery composites, using multi-scale computational fluid dynamics of capillary permeation.
Ola Rashwan
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering
Test whether adding a dispersion agent stops silver nanoparticles from clumping inside PAEK polymer filament, and improves extrusion into filament with a consistent diameter.
The school
Drexel University: 11 labs on PI Pages, $170M a year on research, 282 research doctorates a year.
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