Apr 12, 2017
Embryo development, gene scissors and self-squeezing sponges: ERC Advanced Grants for leading TUD-scientists
The European Research Council funds three TU Dresden scientists with ERC Advanced Grants, the most highly-endowed individual grants on a European level. These are awarded for renowned scientists who break new ground in their respective area of research by conducting high-risk research. Biophysicist Prof. Stephan Gill, physician Prof. Frank Buchholz and chemist Prof. Stefan Kaskel are granted approximately EUR 7.3 million for their research. In the past, TUD has already been awarded four ERC Advanced Grants.
Porous materials for new energy and environmental technologies
Stefan Kaskel, Professor for Inorganic Chemistry, is awarded the ERC Advanced Grant worth approximately EUR 2.4 million for his project “Understanding negative gas adsorption in highly porous networks for the design of pressure amplifying materials.” Porous materials play a key role in energy and environmental technologies such as gas and heat storage, hydrogen purification, batteries, air and water purification, energy conversion, catalysis and sensing. In 2016, the team headed by Kaskel discovered a new counter-intuitive phenomenon: A porous material named DUT-49 (DUT = Dresden University of Technology) that reacts upon an externally applied gas pressure by expelling molecules from inner voids, giving rise to an overall gas pressure amplification. The material may be regarded as a highly porous sponge, which upon reaching a certain degree of filling contracts autonomously in a self-squeezing manner to expel the charge loaded in the inner volume. Such materials may have tremendous implications for the design of threshold sensitive micropneumatic devices or stimuli responsive self-propelling systems. In order to enable a knowledge-based exploitation of pressure amplifying materials in the future, the ERC grant focuses on the fundamental understanding of the underlying thermodynamics and rational tuning of pressure amplifying porous materials. Prof. Kaskel feels honoured and motivated by this extraordinary recognition of his work: “The ERC Advanced Grant is an enormous motivation for me and my team, acknowledging in depth the fundamental understanding of new phenomena as a crucial rational basis for sustainable technological exploitation.”