Designing smart materials from scratch

Everyone playing with construction bricks has started with cubic blocks: you first stack the blocks on the top of each other and then align the resulting towers side by side, giving birth to a flat surface you cannot look through, namely a wall. When bricks have a more rounded shape, think of half-moon blocks for instance, and you stack them on the top of each other, the edges of the resulting towers -- when aligned -- do not touch everywhere and thus the wall has regular arrays of holes and can act, e.g., as a filter. Different shapes of the blocks result into different shapes (and sizes) of the holes, thus determining what can pass through the filter and what cannot. In other words, you can design the bricks such that their specific features (the shape) allow you to build architectures with desired properties (the porosity of the filter). 

Project period: 15/03/2019 - present