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.…

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!

Have you ever spilled your cup of coffee? You may have noticed how the coffee dries into an intriguing stain with a bright centre and a dark ring encircling it. This “coffee ring” forms because the liquid evaporates faster at the edges, inducing a flow from the droplet interior towards…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.  

In November 2021, Prof. Nicolas Vogel of the Institute of Particle Technology was awarded the “Lehrpreis der technischen Fakultät” (Teaching award of the Faculty of Engineering). According to the selection committee, the awards reflects the excellent student evaluations of the courses given by Prof. Vogel over the last five years…

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.

Colloidal supraparticles promise exciting applications. But are they mechanically stable enough to deliver these promises? We investigate the mechanics of colloidal supraparticles under compression. We find a scaling relationship between the supraparticle geometry and its fracture, and how the fracture is influenced by interparticle adhesion. Many thanks for Benoit Merle,…

A new paper by our PhD student Yara was just published in ACS Omega! In this work, we showed how hierarchical surface roughness can enhance the stability of a ionic liquid film on top of a surface. You can find the complete paper here.  

Yesterday Herbert successfully defended his PhD thesis, becoming the second PhD graduate from the Vogel Group. Congratulations!

A chiral plasmonics review? Don´t panic, we have you covered! In our review, we discuss mostly harmless theory, as well as the design and fabrication of large-area chiral plasmonic substrates. We hope this more tutorial-style review provides easy access to the complex field, and brings chiral plasmonics closer to applications…

Together with Fedja Wendisch and Gilles R. Bourret we fabricated anisotropic Si nanowire arrays over large areas. The pallet of the possible cross-sections was extended to elliptical and crescent-shaped wires using MACE and colloidal lithography. Controlled bundling occurs, leading to anisotropic surface topographies. Find our just accepted paper in Nanoscale Advances.