Nature is able to design transport across membranes selectivity, gated in time, and with a direction, This is a key factor for our life. This performance remains unreached in technological pores and membranes. Thereby, transport through nanopores is relevant in numerous technologies such as catalysis, pollutant monitoring, energy conversion, or separation, recycling, and water treatment. Thus, nanoporous material and membrane- and with this nanopore transport design is one essential aspect for a more sustainable future including new smart industry and sustainable material concepts such as closed water circles and recycling.
To enable advanced transport control beyond the well-established size exclusion, precision in technological nanopore design needs to be improved. Thus, we need to push the limits of control on structure and functionalization in nanoscale porous materials and membranes. Furthermore, we need to understand the correlation between nanoscale structural and functional nanopore design and resulting transport or separation performance. This understanding is expected to enable, to date, technically unachieved transport control. To do so fundamental challenges in material synthesis and characterization have to be addressed.
To approach this goal 3D-FNPWriting developed a technology platform allowing automated porous material design with structural and functional control from the nanometer- to the macroscopic length scale. This is based on light-based 3D-printing of in-situ functionalized mesoporous material architectures as well as on local polymer writing into mesoporous films adapting high resolution microscopy techniques to induce photoreactions and especially photopolymerization down to the nanoscale. Based on this fundamental research 3D-FNPWriting provided the technology platform, new porous materials, as well as fundamental understanding on transport design strategies which may become relevant in future technologies such as recycling or adaptable material design.
