IMX Seminar Series - Wood materials – future potentials and limitations

Renewability and CO2-storing capacity of the resource wood have triggered increasing scientific interest in the development of functional wood materials. Exciting opportunities arise from the modification and functionalization of wood by taking advantage of its hierarchical structure. Wood provides a porous and anisotropic structure with excellent mechanical properties making it an eligible biomaterial to develop high-performance composites and hybrid materials. Wood treatments can lead to wood materials with improved properties and/or new functions. Recent concepts and approaches to obtain new wood materials will be presented. Additional focus will be laid on predicted changes in resource provision and fields of application of wood in the future, which will be discussed with a view to potentials and limitations of wood in becoming a key resource of a net zero society.

Bio: Ingo Burgert has been a Professor for Wood Materials Science at ETH Zurich and Empa, since 2011. He studied wood science and technology at the University of Hamburg, Germany and obtained a doctoral degree at the same university in 2000. From 2000 to 2003 he worked as a postdoc at the Institute of Physics and Materials Science of BOKU, the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. From 2003 to 2011, Ingo Burgert was research group leader of the group “Plant Biomechanics and Biomimetics” at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in the Department of Biomaterials, Potsdam, Germany.