主講人簡介：

S. van der Zwaag is a distinguished professor at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, where he leads the group Novel Aerospace Materials in the faculty of Aerospace Engineering. He holds an MSc in metallurgy (specialisation radiation damage in metals), obtained his PhD at Cambridge University for research on supersonic impact phenomena in glasses and IR-transparent ceramics and has been a postdoc in the field of amorphous metals. From 1882-1992 he worked at Akzo NV, at the time the largest technical fibre producer in the world, on the development of aramid fibres. In 1992 he returned to Delft University to take up the chair Microstructural Control in Metals at the Materials Science department. In 2003 he accepted his current chair at the faculty of Aerospace Engineering. His research involves the creation of new materials, metals, functional ceramics and in particular self-healing materials. He has published over 550 journal papers and supervised 55 PhD students. He did receive an honorary doctorate from Mons University (Belgium) in 2016. In 2018 he was awarded the Chinese 1000 talent Foreign Scholar award and a part-time professorship at Tsinghua University.

報告摘要：

Materials science has a long history of more than 20 centuries and although polymer science only contributed to this field for less than 60 years, developments in all materials classes followed only one paradigm and that is “Damage Prevention”. The concept certainly has worked and has brought us many materials with properties far exceeding those found in nature. However, in recent years we have obtained a better understanding of the underlying concepts of materials evolution in natural materials and have come to realise that nature has not optimised its ‘materials’ based on its strength of crack growth resistance, but has opted for a different paradigm, that of “Damage Management”. I will show various routes to turn engineering materials into ‘self-healing’ materials capable of recovering from local mechanical damage and to regain their functional or mechanical properties. While other materials will be addressed too, the focus will be on the strategies to redirect the design concepts behind engineering polymers and to show some of the physical phenomena involved. Prior to presenting my research on self-healing materials, I will show some aspects of my research on aramid fibres.