The exquisite diversity and functionality of biological materials are truly remarkable, especially as they are composed of a small set of abundant chemical elements. While engineering materials primarily require specific, often unsustainable, chemical compositions to realize their functions, nature achieves unparalleled functionality through optimized architectures that span multiple length scales. Water, with its ubiquity and unique structural dynamics, plays a pivotal role as a “working fluid” in shaping the properties and functionality of nature’s materials. Inspired by these marvels of nature, BlueMat will develop a novel class of sustainable, interactive, architected “blue” materials deriving their functionality from multiscale structures of hard matter interacting with water. This is a globally unique approach. We will mimic natural processes such as water-driven mechanical actuation, capillarity-driven water transport, humidity- dependent color or photocatalytic water splitting as observed in animals and plants, most prominently in trees, and extend them to functionalities not found in nature, such as control of acoustic and electromagnetic waves, tunable thermal emission and electrical energy storage and generation. To this end, we will study and exploit novel effects of water in nanoconfinement, combine experiments and modeling from the molecular to the device scale and bridge the gap between top-down and bottom-up fabrication methods. In parallel, an artistic perspective of water-material interaction will be addressed.
BlueMat raises fascinating and fundamentally new scientific questions and promises radically new functional properties that will be pursued up to device-level applications. This includes windows and insulation for energy efficient architecture and hydrovoltaics for electrical energy harvesting from environmental processes or waste heat. To accomplish this, BlueMat draws upon the exceptional talents of an interdisciplinary team from several world-class research institutions in Hamburg with outstanding expertise in molecular water science, multiscale materials, process engineering, and diverse application areas including micromechanics, fluidics, photonics, energy systems, computer science, and art.
