Applied Biobased materials Conference 2018
On the 20th of April Aachen-Maastricht Institute for Biobased Materials (AMIBM) hosted its third international conference on Applied Biobased Materials (ABC). This year's theme was: Biobased Materials for Innovations in Fibre Applications. It was an inspiring day for all 130 visitors.
After an introduction by Joost van den Akker (Regional Minister of Economic Affairs and Knowledge Infrastructure Vice Governor, Province of Limburg), AMIBM’s Scientific director, Stefan Jockenhövel, presented AMIBM including the missions and their ambitions to the futures. Next to this, international guest speakers as well as AMIBM scientists gave us insights in the latest developments in biobased materials. The keynote speaker, professor Pasi Kallio from the Tampere University of Technology in Finland, talked about the ‘Microrobotics for High Throughput Characterization of Biobased Fibre Materials’.
After this presentation, six areas of expertise then followed each other. More information about these interesting topics, you can read in the article of Agro & Chemie by Pierre Gielen.
PhD student wins best poster award
During the breaks there were poster presentations. PhD student Geert Noordzij has won the Best Poster Award with his poster presentation about cyclopentanediol, a new biobased building block. One of the research lines within AMIBM focusses on developing polymer materials from new building blocks obtained from renewable feedstocks. The winning research of Geert, The curious case of cyclopentanediol, focused on a potential renewable building block to assess if this building block can be used for new functional materials.
The represented results show that predictions based on functionality can still hold unexpected behavior, and what we can learn from analyzing instability and degradation pathways of these building blocks and their related polymers. It was shown that the (unexpected) inherent thermal instability of one of these building blocks could be used as cross-linker to strengthen the polymer.
ABC Conference 2019
Next year the ABC conference will be integrated with Brightlands Rolduc Polymer Conference.
Save the date: 9-11 September 2019
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