»Materialwissenschaft – von der Biomimese zur Bioinspiration«

Cluster Co-Director Peter Fratzl has published a guest article in the »Austria Presse Agentur- Science« in the series »Lehrmeisterin Natur«. Under the title »Materials science - from biomimesis to bioinspiration«, he explores the question of what makes natural materials so interesting for materials scientists. On the one hand, there are the renewable raw materials such as wood or cotton, which are widely used as building materials or textiles. On the other hand, it is the fact that nature succeeds in producing materials with an incredible variety of properties and applications from comparatively few and not always very high-quality basic materials.

The key to this diversity lies in the hierarchical structure of these materials: molecules with the size of a few nanometers are formed into fibers and layers that are about a thousand times larger and lie in the micrometer range. These building blocks form even larger elements up to the scale of millimeters and more. This repeated arrangement of building blocks consisting of smaller building blocks offers the possibility of structural customization on many size scales and thus broad variation in properties.

The entire article can be read here (only in German): https://science.apa.at/gastbeitrag/materialwissenschaft-von-der-biomimese-zur-bioinspiration/