Materials & Manufacturing

Materials are of foundational importance for our technological society. Particularly in these times, when we are challenging huge environmental issues like climate change, it is of paramount importance to be aware that use of materials has a crucial environmental impact. In order to reduce our material footprint, we will have to work more and more with recycled materials and one way of doing so is utilising materials that we extract from waste streams.

The elective course Materials and Manufacturing ( M & M ) centers(M&M) in Quarter 3 centers on designing innovative materials and products using bio-waste or bio-based resources such as plants, starch, wood, coffee and tea waste, textiles, seaweed, Japanese knotweed, and more. For example, why not use biocomposites made from Japanese knotweed to create everyday utensils as sustainable alternatives to conventional plastics? How might we repurpose the coffee and tea waste generated daily?

M&M aimsaims to deepen your awareness of how design and materials can contribute to a sustainable future. The course challenges you to transform waste streams into new materials that generate positive environmental impact and foster societal awareness. You'll learn how to create and combine waste into bio-based composites, and how to test and evaluate their technical properties—such as stiffness, strength, and ductility—toward designing and producing functional, meaningful products.

There are several companies/material developers involved in this course; they are on board to share their journey from materials towards their product(s) and to help you to motivate your material and product of choice. Companies such as The Green village at TU, Ubuntoo (the environmental solutions platform), WhyKnot, Bambooder biobased fibers, NPSP biocomposites and many more are involved in this course.

You will learn appropriate tools which are needed to design with such new (and often not yet existing) material composites. How can you best model, make and test a product made by a new material designed by yourself? Manufacturing, technical testing and user aspects of the case studies will be topics in this elective.

The content of this course is relevant for you, because you will gain knowledge and insight on how selection of appropriate manufacturing techniques and of materials will condition the design of a product. The performance (technical and experiential) of finished products is ultimately determined by underlying materials and manufacturing characteristics.