Obiettivo
The development of new technologies in areas as diverse as energy, transportation or healthcare requires new lightweight, high-performance structural materials with unprecedented combinations of strength and toughness. Unfortunately, these two properties tend to be mutually exclusive in synthetic structures. Nature, however, is very effective in designing strong and tough materials through the creation of hierarchical architectures which span multiple length-scales from atomic to macroscopic dimensions. The notion of replicating natural designs (biomimetics) has generated enormous interest but has yielded few technological advances, primarily because of the lack of processing techniques able to achieve, in practical dimensions, such complex structural hierarchy. Recent results have shown how the freezing of ceramic suspensions can be used to replicate Nature’s concept of hierarchical design and create strong ceramic-polymer materials with exceptional toughness, up to 300 times higher (in energy terms) than their constituents. The objective of the present grant is to follow this approach and create a new family of bio-inspired structural materials that will exhibit unprecedented combinations of strength and toughness. This will be achieved by combining new processing techniques based on the concept of ice templating with microstructural with mechanical characterization and modeling at multiple length scales, from the atomic to the macro levels. The work will be supported by basic studies in fields as diverse as the freezing of suspensions or mechanical behavior. The results will have significance in fields as diverse as materials science, chemistry or biology. Particular attention will be placed on the creation of bone-like ceramic-based materials for orthopedic implants and a new generation of ceramic-metal hybrids with potential for applications at very high temperature under extreme environments.
Campo scientifico
Invito a presentare proposte
FP7-PEOPLE-2010-RG
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Meccanismo di finanziamento
MC-IRG - International Re-integration Grants (IRG)Coordinatore
SW7 2AZ LONDON
Regno Unito