Materials are fundamentally important for innovations in engineering as well as for the manufacturing of consumer goods. Biogenic and biobased materials from renewable resources are a prerequisite for the sustainable production of advanced structural and functional materials for a variety of applications in all areas of industry (automotive, mechanical engineering, aviation, boat building), society (architecture, civil engineering, medicine) and environment (energy technology, recycling, biodegradation).
Research Groups
Project Highlights
Light guides play an important role in advanced data transmission. The Chair for Biogenic Polymers (Prof. Zollfrank) develops optical fibers and waveguides which consist solely of renewable resources. Cellulose from wood, especially, is a material with high potential for use in optical technologies. In a cooperation project with the University of Bayreuth (Fibrelab), based on biological models optical fibers, among other things, are created from composite material made from cellulose and spider silk proteins. The starting materials for biopolymer and bionic light guides are sustainably available and possess favorable, environmentally compatible characteristics.
The Chair of Biogenic Functional Materials focuses on building bridges between biology and technology for next-generation bio-hybrid lighting (LEDs and LECs) and photovoltaics (solar cells and windows). Are biogenic materials stable enough for your technologies at home? Can we produce parts of our structural components based on bacteria? Well, the answers are yes! The goal of Prof. Costa and his team is the advancement of commercial LEDs, LECs and solar windows to replace until now expensive, rare, toxic, or difficult to recycle materials with sustainable and affordable protein materials without output losses.
In this project funded by the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU) novel biogenic hotmelt formulations based on birch bark with tailored properties via targeted functionalisation of birch bark pitch.
The biomechanical properties of cottonid – a fibre materials based on cellulose – are quantified in this project funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) with respect to its actuation characteristics in cooperation with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Walther (TU Dortmund).
Natural and artificially optimised optical materials are studied in this DFG Pritority Programme (SPP1839, spokesman Cordt Zollfrank) with respect to fundamental scientific questions and various topics of material science and engineering. Using inspiration from biological systems, results from physics, chemical approaches and validation from simulation the SPP will enable the design of novel advanced photonic materials.
More information can be found on the project website: https://www.cs.tum.de/spp1839/
