Material Matters – Nature’s recipe for enhanced performance

The title: Nature’s recipe for enhanced performance – it’s not all ‘baked-in functionality’…

Abstract

Nature provides a plethora of materials with different functionalities which can act as a source of inspiration to solve the limitations of synthetic composite materials and, by extension, solve the key societal challenges of today and tomorrow. Clearly, natural and engineering materials are governed by a very different choice of base elements and by different fabrication methodologies. In these domains, different strategies have to be pursued to achieve the desired functionality.
For example, natural materials with poor ‘mechanical’ constituents can overcome their performance limitations by creating complex, often hierarchical, structuring of their composition; a feature which can be readily adopted in the engineering world.
Conversely, we know that natural materials grow according to a recipe stored in the genes; rather than being fabricated according to an exact design. Although the recipe is ‘baked-in’, a living organism also possesses the ability of adaptation to external changing influences.
This is truly amazing and imagine if a synthetic material could have these attributes… through the discussion of his research, Richard Trask will introduce the latest advances in both hierarchical structuring and functional adaptation and ask whether we, as material scientists, need to be mindful of ‘baked-in functionality’, when designing the products of the future. 

Bio: 

Richard Trask is Professor of Advanced Materials, in the Bristol Composite Institute (BCI) at the University of Bristol, UK.
He has been working in the field of fibre reinforced composites since 1995 when he joined UK MoD Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DERA). In 2001 he joined the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and undertook his PhD at the University of Southampton on ‘Theoretical and practical validation of repair techniques to advanced composite structures’.
Since joining Bristol in 2004, he has become a renowned expert in multifunctional fibre reinforced composite materials.
He was awarded a prestigious UK Engineering Fellowships for Growth (2014-19) focussing on "Morphogenesis Manufacturing: Smart Materials with Programmed Transformations". He was the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Multifunctional Materials journal, from 2017 to Feb 2020; on the Editorial Board and Associate Editor of ‘Smart Materials and Structures’ journal, from 2014 to 2025; and, currently on the Editorial Board of the journal Composites Part C: Open Access (Topical Section: Multi-functional Composites), from 2020.  
To date, he has published 80 journal publications, two book chapters and is the lead academic in Bristol on two highly prestigious national Programme Grants – NextCOMP (next generation of hierarchical fibre composite materials for compression) and the recently awarded EleCOMP (Electric Composites). 
The key focus of his research is directed towards the development of biologically inspired multifunctional composite materials and structures, specifically targeted towards synthetic fibrous polymer composite materials in high-performance applications.