Human mobility is entering a new era and in all these changes polymeric materials are playing a key role. The car of the future should be safe, comfortable and sustainable. Our polymer processing capabilities offer unique options for combining dissimilar materials like metals, thermoplastics, rubbers, thermosets, and advanced composites, all functionally integrated in a lightweight hybrid design. Our research programme in lightweighting focuses on materials, processing and recycling aspects of engineering plastics, composites and hybrids.

Lightweight is a critical factor for sustainability in future transport applications but function integration is becoming more and more important in new design concepts. Multifunctional polymeric materials developed in our group target optical transparency, structural colour, electrical and thermal conductivity, energy generation and storage, as well as integrated sensing of stimuli like deformation, damage, humidity, temperature etc.

These materials are utilized in such diverse fields as filtration, textiles, composites, nonwovens, insulation, paper, packaging, adhesives, coatings, multilayers etc. The main aim is to control structure-property relationships at the molecular and mesoscopic scale. Functionalities may include sustainability, high strength, barrier properties, optical properties or stimuli-responsive “intelligent” sensors or actuators.

Processing of ceramic materials and highly-loaded polymer-ceramic composites for functional and structural applications

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