The design of new materials can have a huge impact on our lives and living environment. From this perspective, there are great opportunities for, for example, responsive, adaptive, self-repairing, highly engineered, energy-saving and reusable materials. There is also a need for materials for applications under extreme conditions, such as in aerospace and deep sea mining. Discovering such materials requires a new design philosophy. Advancing understanding of nanostructures, nanofabrication and instruments for nanocharacterisation have made small-scale engineering possible. At the same time, the focus of materials science has shifted to functional materials that perform an active function. The challenge is to combine materials research at different scales with the search for active functions. Combinations of advanced computer simulations and modern experimental techniques can help design materials on the drawing board, rather than discovering
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In the coming years, smart materials will become increasingly important for a wide range of technologies, from medicine to computing. The materials of the future will come from collaborations between scientists from a wide variety of fields of expertise, such as polymers, composites, semiconductors, biomaterials and soft materials. Dutch materials research in academic, applied and public-private partnerships is highly regarded internationally. The social and economic opportunities are great, as can be seen, among other things, from the versatile application possibilities. Questioners mention smart windows that respond to light, self-healing structural materials, synthetic cells, bioelectronics compatible with the human body, materials for energy generation, storage and conversion, materials that protect against accidents, attacks and assaults, materials for self-assembling nanomachines, materials for new medicines, foldable surfaces that are luminous or responsive, and materials that respond to climatic stimuli, among others. New materials are key to answering the big societal questions in energy, mobility, built environment, communication, health, safety and sustainability, and will lead to totally unforeseen products in markets that do not yet exist.
