| Description | Sustainable biocomposite materials from plant cells
Eleftheria Roumeli, Assistant Professor, UW Materials Science & Engineering
Tuesday, Nov 17, 2020 @ 3:30pm
washington.zoom.us…
(UW NetID required)
Abstract: Biocomposite materials are composites with at least one component made from renewable resources, and offer promising solutions to our society’s urgent demands for more environmentally sustainable materials. However the majority of biocomposite materials we use today comprise of a petroleum-derived polymer matrix, reinforced with fillers from natural resources, such as plant fibers. In this talk we will discuss an emerging class of biocomposite materials, in which the polymer matrix is entirely made by a biological organism, and in particular from plant cells. Following biological design principles, we will demonstrate how we utilize the nanocomposite cell walls developed in plant cells as a fundamental structural building block and apply processing methods to engineer their arrangement in the micro-scale to achieve mechanical properties akin to commercial plastics. Since the produced materials are entirely made out of plant cell components, they are fully biodegradable and we can tune their properties by either modifying the processing method or the cell growth conditions. Thus, this new class of cell-based sustainable materials offers a versatile hybrid manufacturing platform to design new biopolymer-based sustainable composites with tunable properties.Bio: Eleftheria Roumeli joined the Materials Science & Engineering department of UW in January 2020 as an Assistant Professor and is also a member of the Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute. Her group creates hierarchical polymer nanocomposite materials and studies the influence of nanoparticles and architecture on the mechanical and thermal properties of polymers. The 2 key focus areas are (i) sustainable biocomposites from natural resources (plant and algae cells), and (ii) architected nanocomposites through two-photon lithography. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology and ETH Zurich. She received her B.S. (2009) and Ph.D. in Physics (2014) from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. In her Ph.D. research, she focused on identifying structure-property relationships in polymer nanocomposite materials. * The seminar is part of the ME Graduate Seminar Series (ME 520) |
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