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The German Research Foundation just announced that CRC1411 will receive funding until 2028 with Niki as a spokesperson. The long-term vision of CRC1411 is to develop particle systems with controlled size, shape and composition. The innovative approach in CRC1411 is is that these materials are first developed and optimized for specific product properties in computer models. In the second step, the computer then predicts optimal synthesis conditions that lead to particles with these desired properties. This approach reverses typical manufacturing processes and promises fast and resource-efficient access to functional particle-based… Read More »Collaborative Research Center CRC 1411 will be funded for another 4 years

Jonathan won the 1st prize for his poster on entropic trapping in spherical colloidal clusters at the PBM23. Great start to his PhD! 

Check out our newest paper by Katharina and Teresa about sustainable superhydrophobic and slippery coatings using a water-based system and renewable sources. Natural drying oils were implemented as binding material and natural non-drying oils as lubricants to minimize the environmental impact.  

Catalysts are of utmost relevance for the production of chemicals and energy storage with hydrogen. Researchers at the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy (HI ERN) and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have now discovered that the formation of bubbles in the pores of a catalyst can be essential for its activity. Their findings help to optimize catalyst materials for reactions in which gases are formed from liquids – and which play a central role in a future green hydrogen economy. Read more

Check out the new podcast-episode of “morgen beginnt heute” – Teresa explains how we are using models from nature to prepare our self-cleaning coatings!

On July 5th Salvatore successfully defended his PhD thesis!

Bionic innovation towards environmental protection – The successful end of our joined project BayBionik with the Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment and Consumer Protection was celebrated at a final event at the Bionicum in the Tiergarten Nürnberg. We presented our work on self-cleaning and sustainable surface coatings to the public and Staatsminister Thorsten Glauber. You can read the full article here.

From sticky mussel-inspired chemistry to the slippery liquid-infused surfaces, we could combine two bioinspired approaches with opposite interfacial properties to fabricate repellent surfaces with an in-situ self-functionalizing lubricant! New paper out in  in ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces! Read it here  

We’re very happy our research caught some attention at the recent in-person events we attended! Teresa was awarded the best poster prize both at Processnet and Bioinspired Material 2022 and Giulia won the best talk award at the CLINT iRTG workshop. We’re glad our work on environmentally friendly repellent surface coatings in the frame of the BayBionik project carried out by Teresa and Giulia’s results on colloidal templated supports for liquid metal catalysts were so well received.  

New paper by Teresa is published in Green Chemistry!In this work we introduce a simple and environmentally benign method to create functional coatings mimicking the lotus leaf and the pitcher plant in a scalable process. In contrast to conventional fabrication processes that typically require toxic components and elevated temperatures, we developed an aqueous dispersion-based, fluorine-free coating system that produces highly repellent surface coatings at ambient conditions. This work is a contribution to the Baybionik Projektverbund. Read the full paper here!

New paper by Junwei Wang et al on Polyhedral Metal-Organic Framework particles are assembled in droplets into supraparticles that exhibit structural color is out! find it here

Congrats to Junwei to make it to the cover of Advanced Materials with his recent article on how to easily make double emulsion!

Curious to know more about the research going on at FAU and about the elite master program MAP? The English-taught interdisciplinary M.Sc. programme “Advanced Materials and Processes” (MAP) offers their annual MAP poster session again in a digital format on 9 February 2022 from 4:00 to 6:30 pm. Part time attendance is possible.MAP students of the third semester present scientific posters showing the results of their mini projects and other research work. After short introductions of two poster sets, each poster and the scientific work behind it can be individually… Read More »MAP poster session 2022

Little budget, no microfluidic experience, but want to make water-in-oil-in-water droplets? No problem. Teaming up with SMaL, Junwei develop a simple method to make double emulsions of a single core and a micrometer-thick shell, using only centrifuge tubes and a vortex mixer. Full article here.  

Congratulations to Yara for winning the best presentation prize at The 1st AUGM (Asociacion de Universidades Grupo Montevideo)  – BAYLAT (Bavaria-Latin America University Center)PhD Student Symposium on “Materials for Energy, Environment and Health.

J. Fischer*, N. Vogel*, R. Mohammadi, C.K. Weiss, K. Landfester and M. Kreiter Plasmon hybridization and strong near-field enhancements in opposing nanocrescent dimers with tunable resonances Nanoscale 2011, 3, 4788