It has been\ntime for the Material Chemistry (MC) Conference again, the 14th of this name.\nBirmingham’s Aston University hosted the event this July.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Material\nChemistry is a broad field. It spans from energy device materials to polymers,\nfrom biological applications to purely theoretical ones. Apart from plenary\ntalks, there were four parallel sessions and it was not always easy for me to\ndecide which might be of interest for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Clearly,\nthe “In” material at the moment is perovskite. Perovskite is a long\nknown mineral (discovered 1839) containing the elements Barium, titanium and\noxygen in a certain ordering. All these elements can be substituted, and if the\nratios are maintained, you obtain materials with the same structure but with a\nsurprising range of properties. For example, they can be used as capacitors,\nsuperconductors, in LEDs and very recently in post-silicon solar cell\ntechnologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One very\nfascinating talk concerned debonding. That is to invent an adhesive which\nbreaks up by some trigger, chemical or other, and releases the parts bonded\ntogether by this adhesive. Imagine a smartphone assembled with this adhesive.\nAfter it has reached its life’s end, you just use this trigger and the whole\nthing falls apart. You can easily separate the different building units and\nrecycle them more easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of my\nmain interests – at least right now – is medical applications. One subject here\nis hydrogels, which are networks of hydrophilic polymers. They can be used for\ndrug delivery or tissue engineering. Another emerging subject is 3D printing of\nimplants and so on. You can print substitutes for cartilage, teeth or bones.\nBut you can also use biologically degradable materials which are inserted into\nsome wound and favour healing. They are “anchor points” for\nbiological materials that grow along the implant and eventually close the wound\nwhile the original implant is degraded. The ideas even go father: Printing\nwhole organs, for example a heart. The printing technology is pretty far\nadvanced, but the materials for medical applications still need development –\nand approval of the FDA and other regulatory authorities of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another\nissue is energy, of course. Although lithium ion batteries are state of the art\nnowadays, there are still a lot of questions to be answered and problems to be\nsolved. One talk concerned a study of electrode manufacturing for LIBs. The\nmanufacturing of LIBs is a long process and one step is a formation process\nthat takes several weeks! The research group studied the different steps and\ntried to curtail the whole process. But although they showed some fascinating\nideas, these are far from being implemented in current processes. What a pity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were\na lot of other subject matters and I certainly missed some interesting ones.\nBut all in all in I learned quite a lot and it was an inspiring event showing\nthat Chemistry is at the centre for solving many of the problems the world\nfaces today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It has been time for the Material Chemistry (MC) Conference again, the 14th of this name. Birmingham’s Aston University hosted the event this July. Material Chemistry is a broad field. It spans from energy device materials to polymers, from biological applications to purely theoretical ones. Apart from plenary talks, there were four parallel sessions and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,9,39,12,24,52,31],"tags":[19,42,18,25,51,33],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-conference","category-energy","category-further-education","category-material-sciences","category-medical","category-nanomaterials","tag-conference","tag-energy","tag-further-education","tag-materials-science","tag-medical-applications","tag-nanomaterials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chem-ued.de\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chem-ued.de\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chem-ued.de\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chem-ued.de\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chem-ued.de\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chem-ued.de\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/chem-ued.de\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chem-ued.de\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chem-ued.de\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chem-ued.de\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}