Soaring population growth, supply and demand imbalance, shortage of ready-to-use remedies, and urbanization have imposed unprecedented challenges to satisfying the world’s essential needs for water, healthcare, food, and energy. Aim of the webinar is to address some of the quintessential challenges of the 21st century in water treatment and precision medicine by designing conceptually novel soft material platforms based on micro- and nanoengineering the most abundant natural bioproducts. The overarching goal is to provide transformative and/or translational solutions based on highly renewable resources that can set the stage for the adoption of affordable, widespread technologies with immediate benefits for humans and ecosystems. This webinar will detail how nanoengineering the most abundant biopolymer in the world, cellulose, has led to the invention of biomass-based, environmentally friendly threshold (ppm level) antiscaling additives and scale-resistant membranes. The speaker will introduce a fundamentally novel family of nanocelluloses, named hairy cellulose nanocrystals, and explain how they overcome the limitations of current nanocelluloses, cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) and cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs), to open new horizons in environmental and biomedical applications. This nanomaterial platform shows the power of harnessing nature’s building blocks to produce functional soft matter. Colloidal particles, polymers, gels, foams, dispersions, and emulsions created from this abundant resource can leverage eminent, cost-effective technologies for improving the quality of modern life.
- Webinar
- Micro and Nanotechnologies
