Overview

The project "Smart Functional Foams" is one of four flagship projects of the education and research unit "Surface, Coatings & Particles Engineering" (SPERU) in the framework of the Competence Center of Materials Science and Technology (CCMX) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

This project focuses on applying a novel direct foaming method to fabricate ceramic, metallic and polymeric foams. Such wet foams are important in a variety of different applications ranging from food and cosmetics to oil recovery, blast mitigation and fire extinguishing. Well-established and emerging applications that use wet foams as an intermediate structure to produce macroporous materials are also widely spread in the engineering field to fabricate thermal insulating materials and low-weight structures, as well as in medicine to produce artificial implants and scaffolds for drug delivery and tissue engineering.

This novel foaming method is based on the use of particles as foam stabilizers, resulting in wet foams that are extremely resistant against bubble coarsening and drainage. Due to the high versatility of the method and the possibility to tailor the microstructure of the porous materials in a wide range, we expect this novel foaming method to open new opportunities
in a wide number of areas.