New class of adaptive materials developed from nature

New materials developed within Contex-t

Tensile membrane structures were the focus of extensive research during a four year FP6 project Contex-T. This project brought together experts from different disciplines to bring the technology for building membrane structures forward. Membrane materials, tension devices, supporting structure, comfort and safety aspects of membrane constructions were studied. This has resulted in a number of s...

Focus on New Materials Mimicking Nature.

A New Adaptive Extended Kalman Filter for a Class of Nonlinear Systems

This paper proposes a new adaptive extended Kalman filter (AEKF) for a class of nonlinear systems perturbed by noise which is not necessarily additive. The proposed filter is adaptive against the uncertainty in the process and measurement noise covariances. This is accomplished by deriving two recursive updating rules for the noise covariances, these rules are easy to implement and reduce the n...

Bioinspired self-healing materials: lessons from nature

Healing is an intrinsic ability in the incredibly biodiverse populations of the plant and animal kingdoms created through evolution. Plants and animals approach healing in similar ways but with unique pathways, such as damage containment in plants or clotting in animals. After analyzing the examples of healing and defense mechanisms found in living nature, eight prevalent mechanisms were identi...

Nanocelluloses: a new family of nature-based materials.

Cellulose fibrils with widths in the nanometer range are nature-based materials with unique and potentially useful features. Most importantly, these novel nanocelluloses open up the strongly expanding fields of sustainable materials and nanocomposites, as well as medical and life-science devices, to the natural polymer cellulose. The nanodimensions of the structural elements result in a high su...