The Multiscale Balance of Order and Disorder as the Key to Tailor Various Properties of Soft Materials
Event details
| Date | 05.12.2016 |
| Hour | 13:15 › 14:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Holger Frauenrath, EPFL - Laboratory of Macromolecular and Organic Materials |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
In structural biomaterials, nature does not only accept the inevitable presence of disorder but actually plays with it; it controls the placement of disorder on some length scales, uses it to create structures on others, and creates structural gradients between ordered and disordered domains to guide external fields. The result is the creation of carefully optimized materials from self-sorting mixtures of imperfect parts. With this perspective, we investigate hierarchically structured soft materials comprising 2D or 1D nanostructures. In our materials, we combine disordered polymer segments with well-defined molecular segments capable of hydrogen bonding as a directional supramolecular interaction to establish a high degree of short range order. We have successfully implemented these concepts to control different properties across various classes of materials. For instance, we obtained organic nanowires that show an unprecedented photogeneration of charge carriers with unusually long life times and at concentrations close to the insulator-metal boundary.1 Moreover, we have prepared hierarchically structured supramolecular elastomers that can be tuned to either be reinforced rubbers or supramolecular interpenetrating networks that result in high performance damping materials.2 Finally, we used the nanoscale engineering of the order-disorder interface to create semiaromatic polyamides with high strength and stiffness but a significantly increased ductility. Therefore, it seems that better understanding the intricate interplay of order and disorder on different length scales will be relevant to design novel soft materials with unusual property profiles.
References
(1) Marty, R.; Szilluweit, R.; Sánchez-Ferrer, A.; Bolisetty, S.; Adamcik, J.; Mezzenga, R.; Spitzner, E.-C.; Feifer, M.; Steinmann, S. N.; Corminboeuf, C.; Frauenrath, H. ACS Nano 2013, 7, 8498.
(2) Croisier, E.; Su, L.; Schweizer, T.; Cugnoni, J.; Mionic, M.; Snellings, R.; Balog, S.; Michaud, V.; Frauenrath, H. Nature Communications 2014, 5, 5728.
Bio:
Holger Frauenrath (born in Aachen, Germany) studied chemistry at RWTH Aachen, Germany from 1992 to 1997, with a focus on synthetic organic chemistry. He performed his PhD thesis from 1998 to 2001 in the research group of Prof Hartwig Höcker at RWTH Aachen, working on a project related to the stereospecific polymerization of methacrylates as well as their copolymerization with olefins using zirconocene catalysts.
Holger Frauenrath then joined the group of Prof. Sam Stupp at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA, as a postdoctoral fellow supported by a Feodor Lynen fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His postdoctoral research projects were centered around the supramolecular self-assembly of rod-coil molecules.
Holger Frauenrath returned to Germany in 2003 and started to build his own research group at FU Berlin, funded with an Emmy Noether Grant from the German Science Foundation. In 2005, the research group moved to the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where it became a scientifcally independent part of the Polymer Chemistry Group led by Prof. A. Dieter Schlüter. Holger Frauenrath obtained his Habilitation from ETH Zurich in 2009.
In 2009, Holger Frauenrath has been appointed as a professor at the Institute of Materials (IMX) of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, building the new Laboratory of Macromolecular and Organic Materials (LMOM). In the same year, Holger Frauenrath was received the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Investigator grant.
Holger Frauenrath then joined the group of Prof. Sam Stupp at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA, as a postdoctoral fellow supported by a Feodor Lynen fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His postdoctoral research projects were centered around the supramolecular self-assembly of rod-coil molecules.
Holger Frauenrath returned to Germany in 2003 and started to build his own research group at FU Berlin, funded with an Emmy Noether Grant from the German Science Foundation. In 2005, the research group moved to the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where it became a scientifcally independent part of the Polymer Chemistry Group led by Prof. A. Dieter Schlüter. Holger Frauenrath obtained his Habilitation from ETH Zurich in 2009.
In 2009, Holger Frauenrath has been appointed as a professor at the Institute of Materials (IMX) of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, building the new Laboratory of Macromolecular and Organic Materials (LMOM). In the same year, Holger Frauenrath was received the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Investigator grant.
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- General public
- Free
Organizer
- Fabien Sorin & Michele Ceriotti
Contact
- Fabien Sorin & Michele Ceriotti