Towards multifunctional inorganic materials: biopolymeric templates

Inorganic functional materials are widely applied due to their electrical, optical, magnetic and mechanical properties. Accordingly, these materials exhibit an enormous impact on key technologies relevant for future fields such as energy generation and storage, information and medical technology as well as automotive engineering. The manufacturing of such materials is usually performed at elevated temperature and/or pressure combined with enormous experimental effort and extensive equipment. Consequently, problems arise due to shrinkage or grain growth. In addition, the production of composite materials with multifunctional properties may be severely limited because of the mismatch between the thermal expansion coefficients of the different components. This is also an issue in the combination of inorganic components with temperature sensitive materials, which is limited or even impossible.