DSP-Kolleg
Materials+ From Hierarchical Structure to the Environment
Abstract
Materials play an essential role in everyday life and form the technological basis of our society that relies, for example, on efficient energy conversion, multifunctional biomaterials to sensory input materials that impart stimuli responses through touch, vision or other senses. At the heart of the properties of many materials lie interfacial processes and interactions between micro- and nano-sized entities that interact with the macroscopic physical environment. The interaction of the hierarchical structure and the microphysical environment becomes ever more critical in a changing society that strives to lower its ecological impact and strives for a circular economy and many of the issues our society is currently facing are directly or indirectly associated with the materials in use. Living on a finite planet, natural resources are limited, and energy demands for material production and their connected operation cannot be increased endlessly. This is where this DSP will start by connecting researchers across disciplines with the goal to educate the next generation of researchers in a new line of problem-solving by integrating expertise from materials sciences with life sciences to address challenges, in this specific case, on materials from the nanometre scale up to the macroscopic world. The convergence of different research approaches will be the basis of this DSP and will allow a paradigm shift in how innovative research will be conducted in the future, especially as innovations in research on material innovation are highly influenced by the applied synthesis technique that relies on its environmental footprint. A change in this, in turn, creates novel requirements and challenges for materials to be developed and investigated.
