The new discovery made at DCU provides a way of predicting and controlling electric fields for fabrication of the bio-functional materials which would underpin this wireless biological cell stimulation. The discovery was made possible by the application of a powerful computational technique – finite element method (FEM) where complex physics problems such as electric field distributions are ‘translated’ to digital version and break down into tiny pieces which can be solved more easily.
The DCU team constructed real devices for electro-stimulation enhanced with biocompatible polymers and created their digital version using FEM simulations. The control over the shape, mass, and chemistry of fabricated polymers is achieved by specific electric field distributions in those devices. The results from experiments…