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  • English

    course language

  • 11 weeks

    course duration

  • 2 credit points

    for credit at your university

Smart materials represent a cutting-edge global trend both in fundamental science and emerging technologies. Smart materials science is a truly interdisciplinary area at the intersection of physics, chemistry, chemical engineering, mathematical simulations, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and etc. An online course in smart materials will be of obvious interest for everyone who is interested in modern materials science and emerging trends in engineering, biotechnology, and medicine.

About

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.

Course program

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

Education results

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.