FLow Induced Phase Transitions is a new European Commission H2020 Future Emerging Technologies OPEN project that seeks to change the way we currently think about plastic processing.
The production of plastics in the EU employs 1.45M people and has a turnover of €89B but comes at an environmental cost, consuming ~778GWh of energy per annum, with commensurate CO2 emissions. Currently there is no alternative technology which can compete with existing thermoplastics processing, a process by which the majority of materials are produced through refining oil, polymerisation and extrusion, all at high temperatures. This is a key challenge for industry with pressure increasing to develop low energy, high-quality, wet-processing techniques for consumer products.
We intend to change this landscape with FLIPT.
Over hundreds of millions of years, Nature has evolved numerous strategies for efficient processing of its materials. One such solution has recently arisen from natural silk spinning in the form of FLIPT: FLow Induced Phase Transitions, a truly disruptive process which we believe could hold the key to a new low energy paradigm for polymer processing. Our research to date has shown that silk is at least 1000 times more efficient at processing than a standard polymer by solidifying through dehydration as a result of flow.
This project brings together researchers across the EU into one interdisciplinary team working on translating lessons from nature to make a new range of bio-inspired polymers, aquamelts, that can be processed with minimal energy input.
Our aim is to understand and reverse engineer natural aquamelts in order to establish a completely new bioinspired paradigm for polymer processing. Furthermore not only will this be a completely disruptive technology platform, it also promises to be orders of magnitude more energy efficient and “greener”; being performed at room temperature and water being the only direct by-product of processing. This will be sought through the delivery of two ambitious, yet achievable, objectives:
1) Reverse-engineering natural aquamelts: Learning from silk to develop a fundamental understanding of this novel processing mechanism, which will serve as a design criterion for our biopolymers.
2) Re-evolve candidate biopolymers into aquamelts. Apply our criteria and chemistry to reconfigure a candidate biopolymer’s hydration state to match that of a naturally occurring aquamelt. The primary candidate will be widely-available and cheap cellulose, harnessing our decades of experience in its modification and we will also explore the potential of plant polyesters (suberin and cutin), which are commonly regarded as industrial waste stream products.
Such ambition can only be achieved through a highly interdisciplinary consortium and partnership which we have assembled consisting of the diverse fields of zoology, botany, chemistry, physics and materials science and SME partners.
Once accomplished, this project could generate an entirely new state-of-the-art competence and technology for the EU where our novel chemistry and predictive models will be used to design and produce a new range of materials from synthetic or natural sources that can access an aquamelt’s low energy processing route.
