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Laboratory of Soft Materials

Welcome to the webpages of the Soft Materials Group at the ETH Zürich. We are part of the department of Materials (D-MATL). Our research interests relate to soft matter and polymers,  with an emphasis on structural and rheological properties. Materials classes belonging to soft matter range from polymers, colloids over surfactive or active components and mixtures thereof. Recently there has been a strong focus on interface dominated materials in our research.

Our work has a strong fundamental focus, but applications domains are broad. We strive to find high end applications of our work which hopefuly impact society in a longer run, with human health and materials or processes which improve sustainability being most of the time at the core of our work.

On behalf of the Soft Materials group, I wish you enjoyable reading.

Jan Vermant.

Looking for our publications ? direct link!

ETH students Looking for a student project  : scroll down!

 

Group news:

09.23 Congrats to  Dr. Mariana Rodriguez Hakim for landing a position as assitant professor at UNED in Madrid!

07.23 It's a wrap: the external page 19th international congress on rheology is a wrap. Many thanks to the entire group for the help in all the sessions, for the great scientific contributions and the enthusiasm at the party.

 

 

thinning films

News and updates.

 08.23 New paper by Florence on rough particles and how they can be used to makes gels though: Toughening colloidal gels using rough building blocks FJ Müller, L Isa, J Vermant external page Nature Communications 14 (1), 5309

08.23 New paper related to the behaviour of polymers at interfaces: when they are glassy it depends on how you prepare the layers. Interfacial shear rheology of glassy polymers at liquid interfaces S Alexandris, D Ashkenazi, J Vermant, D Vlassopoulos, M Gottlieb
external page Journal of Rheology 67 (5), 1047-1060 2023

07.23 Auxetic interfaces! Model aggregated 2D suspensions in shear and compression: From a fluid layer to an auxetic interface? A Alicke, L Stricker, J Vermant external page Journal of Colloid and Interface Science 652, 317-328 (2023-

On the cover : use flow to structure materials! Structuring Hydrogel Cross-​Link Density Using Hierarchical Filament 3D Printing
Alexandra V. Bayles, Tazio Pleij, Martin Hofmann, Fabian Hauf, Theo Tervoort, and Jan Vermant,  external page ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2022, 14, 13, 15667–15677

 


Student Projects

A range of topics is available, please email prof. Vermant, prof. Tervoort, or any of the group members.  We also list opportunities on SIROP from time to time. We currently have topics for Bachelor thesises, Master projects and master thesises. Some are listed below, but do reach out to hear more.

 

Developing New Materials for Heat Pumps by Engineering Liquid-to-Solid
Phase Transitions

For project details and contact information, please, follow the Download link (PDF, 566 KB)

Arrested Development: Design of a polymer coating to control slip of yield-stress material

For project details, follow this Download link (PDF, 178 KB)

Simplified Industrial Dispersions: Predicting Yielding Behaviour from a Simple Elastoplastic Approach

(Master Project/Master Thesis) For more info, follow the Download link (PDF, 220 KB)

Mechanical characterization of epoxy resin used for high-field superconducting magnets at cryogenic temperatures

For project description and contact information follow the Download link (PDF, 189 KB)

Lung surfactant foams as a model to study alveolar collapse

(BSc/MSc level) For details follow this Download link (PDF, 1 MB)

Check out the Soft Materials @ ETH  Youtube external page channel : Both movies for teaching and highlights from our research.