Bluemat

The aim of BlueMat is to develop nature-inspired, sustainable and interactive material systems that reveal their functionality in water or aqueous environments, or that derive their unique functionality from the special properties of water.

BlueMat's research is true to the motto: “If you can do it with water, do it with water.”

The aim of BlueMat is to develop nature-inspired, sustainable and interactive material systems that reveal their functionality in water or aqueous environments, or that derive their unique functionality from the special properties of water. Many biological materials derive their functionality from hybrid multiscale structures and interaction with water. This distinguishes them from classical engineering materials, which are based on a selection and composition of chemical elements, which are often rare and environmentally unfriendly.

Bioinspired and beyond - many biological materials derive their functionality from hybrid multiscale structures and interaction with water. This distinguishes them from classical engineering materials, which are based on a selection and composition of chemical elements.

We distinguish ourselves from classical soft matter approaches by mainly using stiff microstructures where water interacts as a “working fluid” with the solid phase materials, resulting in truly dynamic, “water-driven” materials.

The interaction with water will be controlled by the combination of different materials and a multiscale hierarchical arrangement based on discrete length scales. This new class of materials is enabled by the special molecular properties of water, in particular its specific intermolecular structure in different aggregate states, on surfaces and in geometric confinement, as well as its distribution inside the material. We see a strong engineering perspective to this research and envision a plethora of possible applications. While the concept is bio-inspired and some applications follow their biological counterparts, such as tunable water transport and humidity driven actuation in plants, we go significantly beyond nature and use water to tune the acoustics, electromagnetics and optics of the materials and to store and generate electrical.

Photo: TU HH