Materials Day 2009 – Today, Tomorrow and Beyond
Introduction
Materials Day
The Symposium “Materials Day” is organized biannually by the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich to bring together faculty, researchers and students with representatives from industry and the media.
The “Materials Day” offers scientific information and opportunities for interaction among the materials community. It is organized as a full day symposium including oral presentations and poster sessions.
The 2009 Materials Day “Department of Materials – Today, Tomorrow and Beyond” aims to give a comprehensive overview over the groups that make up the Department of Materials with a clear focus on future research directions.
Department of Materials
The objectives of the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich are to conduct world-class materials research and to educate materials scientists and engineers at the highest level.
In both research and education, the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich is committed to the idea of materials science spanning many orders of magnitude in size scale, from atoms to products, and also stretching from highly fundamental studies to those with direct technological implications.
The Department of Materials is the core of the Materials Research Center (MRC) at ETH Zurich.
Materials Research Center
The Materials Research Center (MRC) at ETH Zurich is a platform for all materials-related research at ETH. It involves all groups at ETH Zurich with an interest in materials – nearly 300 graduate students, more than 50 professors and eight departments. The MRC capitalizes on synergies between research projects in different departments and enhances the dialogue between academia and industrial partners, thus creating a strong collaborative network.
Program
Abstracts
Bringing (Semiconducting) Polymers to Order
Prof. Paul Smith
The importance of the influence of molecular order on physical characteristics of polymeric - as well as other - materials cannot be overstated. In the past, the correlation between structure and properties has been well established for, for instance, stiffness and strength, which led to the production of ultra-high-performance polymer fibers. Also, the influence of order on optical properties is well documented, which found applications in, among other things, efficient polarizers. In this presentation, routes to increased molecular order will be discussed and applied to semiconducting polymers, which currently are explored for use in “plastic electronic” components such as field-effect transistors and photovoltaic cells. It will be shown that charge-carrier mobilities in these materials - and, hence, the performance of devices comprising them - can be dramatically enhanced by improving their structural perfection.
Download slides (PDF, 3.3 MB), Polymer Technology
Polymers going thick and laterally infinite
Prof. A. Dieter Schlüter
The synthesis group tries to contribute to fundamental issues of polymer chemistry. One such issue is whether the “thickness” of a linear polymer chain is a variable that controls properties very much like the known variables chain and persistence length. Dendronized polymers were created, whose cross-sectional diameter can be systematically increased until sausage-like cylindrical objects are reached. Do these thick polymers have properties which thin ones don’t? Another issue regards conceptual thoughts on 2D polymers and first steps towards a realization. Can one develop the synthetic methodology to generate laterally infinite monomolecular sheets with internal long-range order? The contribution will show where the group presently stands in this endeavor.
Download slides (PDF, 6.6 MB), Polymer Chemistry
Do you speak thermodynamics?
Prof. Hans Christian Öttinger
Thermodynamics is a simple language to formulate and analyze complex problems. The "grammar" of nonequilibrium thermodynamics includes strong formulations of reversible-irreversible separation and the famous second law of thermodynamics. As for any language, fluent articulateness becomes more and more important when problems of increasing complexity or even philosophical depth are to be discussed. To illustrate the immense usefulness and potential of thermodynamics in discussing deep problems in materials science, we consider (i) new ideas for understanding structural glasses, and (ii) systematic coarse graining techniques to bridge scales based on statistical nonequilibrium thermodynamics.
Better Ceramics through Chemistry
Prof. Ludwig Gauckler
Ceramics have outstanding properties, however, they are brittle, non reliable and difficult to shape. Colloidal chemistry allows controlling the interaction of particles and molecules in liquid media. In this presentation, chemical routes are outlined to derive ceramics, polymers and composites with unusual microstructures and properties and to gain insight in the interaction of complex molecules with metal oxide surfaces.
Download slides (PDF, 7.6 MB), Nonmetallic, inorganic Materials
Nanomaterials Synthesis in Organic Solvents: Advantages and Challenges
Prof. Markus Niederberger
Liquid-phase routes to metal oxide nanoparticles in organic solvents under exclusion of water have become a versatile alternative to aqueous methods. In comparison to the complex aqueous chemistry, nonaqueous processes offer the possibility of better understanding and controlling the reaction pathways on a molecular level, enabling the synthesis of nanomaterials with high crystallinity and well-defined and uniform particle morphologies.
The talk will give an overview of nonaqueous liquid-phase routes to inorganic nanoparticles (mainly metal oxides), highlighting advantages as well as challenges of this synthesis strategy. A particular focus will be directed towards microwave-mediated processes. Additionally, chemical pathways involved in nanoparticle formation, problems of nanopowder processing, and selected potential applications of the nanopowders will be discussed.
Why complex materials?
Prof. André R. Studart
Strong and tough, functional, interactive, self-healing, adaptive are highly desirable features in the realm of advanced materials. However, combining these characteristics into one single component has been so far a privilege limited to biological materials such as bones, teeth and sea shells. Such distinctive properties result from a highly sophisticated and evolved structure that combines organic molecules, inorganic matter and living cells into an amazingly complex natural material. To date, these natural structures find no counterparts within man-made materials. In this talk I will show examples of new man-devised processing tools that can be used to build artificial complex materials that capture at least some of the unique features of biological structures. While still primitive if compared to the cell-mediated biomineralization processes occurring in nature, this engineering approach for the fabrication of complex structures might lead to a new generation of smart, functional materials and devices.
Understanding structural complexity
Prof. Walter Steurer
"Packing metal atoms is like packing tennis balls." - Well, that is true for pure aluminum or pure magnesium, but not if you mix them in a ratio three to one. Then you get a complex cluster structure with more than a thousand atoms per unit cell. Or take copper and tantalum; they do not mix at all. Add the same amount of aluminum and a collection of different clusters assemble into structures with more than twenty thousand atoms per unit cell. Last not least, take cadmium and add a few percent of calcium. What you get is a perfectly ordered structure with neat clusters and without unit cell, a quasicrystal with icosahedral symmetry. What are the crucial parameters and driving forces for the creation of structural complexity? How do such crystals grow?
New metallic materials
Prof. Jörg F. Löffler
Three cases will be presented where metallic alloy and structure developments have generated significant advances in the areas of metal physics and technology: (1) bulk metallic glasses, which are high-strength materials and can be used as models for describing deformation mechanisms in disordered systems; (2) metallic nanostructures for the design of plasmonics and meta-materials, useful in biosensing and for studying new phenomena in nanooptics (and nanomagnetism); and (3) light metals for biomedical applications. For each of these topics an outline is presented as to how the development of new materials can both trigger research in basic science and also be of great technological importance.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Materials Behavior at the Nanoscale
Prof. Ralph Spolenak
When the external dimensions of materials become smaller than one micron, some materials properties change. One property, such as strength, increases, whereas others such as fracture toughness and thermal stability decrease. This talk will focus on case studies of scaling in materials properties specifically on metallic materials. The degree of complexity will range from a thin film confinement over a wire geometry to open porous materials. When several properties need to be optimized at the same time, ideal length scales can be defined. These concepts can then be used for the optimal design of bulk materials.
Lubricating with Water: Protecting the Environment by Imitating Nature
Prof. Nicholas Spencer
Man lubricates mostly with oil. Nature lubricates exclusively with water. Pure water is a poor lubricant, but the addition of proteins, especially glycoproteins, can modify surfaces to make them far more lubricious at slow speeds ("boundary lubrication" conditions). In our laboratories we have studied both natural lubrication behavior as well as synthesizing polymers that can render surfaces lubricious under water. The physics behind this lubricity is that of "polymer brushes", and we have carried out fundamental studies of these systems in order to understand their behavior on a molecular level. The insights gained have wide applicability: they could lead to the development of environmentally benign lubricants, as well as helping to understand how wear can be reduced in artificial implants.
Surface Science and Technology
Nano-Acrobatics of Cells Interacting and Sensing Surfaces
Prof. Viola Vogel
Ample evidence exist that bacteria, cells and tissues sensitively respond to mechanical stimuli, including shear flow and the physical properties of their microenvironment. Unraveling the underpinning mechanisms how bacteria and eukaryotic cells can sense and transduce a broad range of mechanical stimuli into distinct sets of biochemical signals that ultimately regulate cellular processes will open totally new avenues to design materials and potentially drugs. New nanotechnology and computational tools begin to reveal novel mechanisms how the stretching of proteins can switch their structure/function relationship, thereby serving as nanoscale mechano-chemical switches. Examples will be discussed illustrating how such insights allow us to regulate in sometimes unexpected ways how cells adhere, proliferate, differentiation and undergo cell death if in contact with engineered surfaces.