Synovial joint lubrication – does nature teach more effective engineering lubrication strategies?

Nature shows numerous examples of systems which show energy efficiency, elegance in their design and optimum use of materials. Biomimetics is an emerging field of research in engineering and successes have been documented in the diverse fields of robotics, mechanics, materials engineering and many more. To date little biomimetics research has been directed towards tribology in terms of transferring technologies from biological systems into engineering applications. The potential for biomimicry has been recognised in terms of replicating natural lubricants but this system reviews the potential for mimicking the synovial joint as an efficient and durable tribological system for potential engineering systems. The use of materials and the integration of materials technology and fluid/surface interactions are central to the discussion

Toward phonon-boundary engineering in nanoporous materials

Tuning thermal transport in nanostructured materials is a powerful approach to develop high-efficiency thermoelectric materials. Using a recently developed approach based on the phonon mean free path dependent Boltzmann transport equation, we compute the effective thermal conductivity of nanoporous materials with pores of various shapes and arrangements. We assess the importance of pore-pore distance in suppressing thermal transport, and identify the pore arrangement that minimizes the thermal conductivity, composed of a periodic arrangement of two misaligned rows of triangular pores. Such a configuration yields a reduction in the thermal conductivity of more than $60 \%$ with respect the simple circular aligned case with the same porosity.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Computational Thermodynamics and Kinetics in Materials Modelling and Simulations

Over the past two decades, Computational Thermodynamics and Kinetics have been tremendously contributed to materials modeling and simulations and the demands on quantitative conceptual design and processing of various advanced materials arisen from various industries and academic institutions involved in materials manufacturing, engineering and applications are still rapidly increasing

Polymer reinforcement with nanoparticles

The Polymers and Composites research group belongs to the Materials Science and Engineering and Chemical Engineering Department of the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain. Its objective is the development and characterization of polymeric materials, focussed in their reinforcement through the dispersion of nanoparticles. Following this method, very small additions of nanoreinforcements usually improve mechanical, electrical and optical properties, as well as the service performance of these materials. The research group is looking for companies interested in applying nanotechnologies to polymers of industrial interest

Protein-based materials, toward a new level of structural control

Through billions of years of evolution nature has created and refined structural proteins for a wide variety of specific purposes. Amino acid sequences and their associated folding patterns combine to create elastic, rigid or tough materials. In many respects, nature’s intricately designed products provide challenging examples for materials scientists, but translation of natural structural concepts into bio-inspired materials requires a level of control of macromolecular architecture far higher than that afforded by conventional polymerization processes. An increasingly important approach to this problem has been to use biological systems for production of materials. Through protein engineering, artificial genes can be developed that encode protein-based materials with desired features. Structural elements found in nature, such as β-sheets and α-helices, can be combined with great flexibility, and can be outfitted with functional elements such as cell binding sites or enzymatic domains. The possibility of incorporating non-natural amino acids increases the versatility of protein engineering still further. It is expected that such methods will have large impact in the field of materials science, and especially in biomedical materials science, in the future