My research project is the Design, Development, and Characterization of 3D Printed PEEK polymer, which can potentially be utilized in biomedical applications as a solution for defective bone tissue. This project fits into my future plans, as I plan to continue to pursue research for the rest of my undergraduate career. I also plan to pursue a Masters and/or PhD degree. An average research day is researching articles that pertain to our research, as well as printing samples using our 3D printer. Due to Covid, we cannot be in the laboratory as much as we would like for testing, so we are waiting until all the samples are done printing to start the testing phase. So far I have discovered how to use PEEK with a 3D printer, as well as the potential applications that this research could be used for. My project stayed the same during Covid, however the timeline was pushed back. Because we were not in the laboratory, an abundance amount of time was spent searching for new articles and other research that could help us with our manuscript for publishing. The next steps in our research is to finish the 27 horizontal samples and start tribological and mechanical testing. After this, we want to print another 27 samples with a vertical orientation and perform these same tests. Then, the data will be compared and analyzed to determine a correlation, which will eventually lead to publishing of our work.
