Smart Materials: Microscale and Macroscale Approaches

A broad variety of materials are actually considered as smart ones: from shape memory alloys to polymer nanosystems. We expect that the audience will benefit from a compact and simple online course that integrates specific modern aspects and trends of fabrication, modification, characterization, and applications of smart materials.

With this course, we would like to introduce specific aspects of an exciting interdisciplinary area “Smart Materials” in a way it can be easily understood by a broad audience. We will focus on how remarkable properties of smart materials correlate with simple structural features at nanoscale and microscale, discuss various methods to characterize materials with smart properties. We will highlight inspiring trends in applications of smart materials. For a microscale approach, we offer the Lab on a Chip technology and tell a story on to use microfluidic chips for fabricating smart systems. For a macroscale approach, we introduce modern analytical methods that are used to characterize smart materials

We expect that this course will be interesting for a broad audience that is keen to learn more about how smart materials contribute to well-established and emerging technologies.

Module 1. Smart Materials: Key Concepts

Module 2. Behind Smart Properties

Module 3. Smart Materials: Research Methods

Module 4. Lab on chip for smart materials

Module 5. From properties to applications: inspiring trends

Identify the properties of smart materials that can be valuable in a specific area of application.

Apply theoretical and experimental approaches to designing, fabricating, and tuning properties of selected solid state and soft matter materials.

Utilize the potential of lab on chip technologies for materials science applications.