Artificial muscles from new materials

€2.5 million from Brussels for cutting-edge research at FAU

With a prestigious award and funding amounting to €2.5m, Prof. Dr. Paul Steinmann from the Institute of Applied Mechanics (LTM) at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has reason to be pleased. Steinmann belongs to the small group of prominent research scientists who, over the next five years, will receive an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. Advanced Grants awarded by the ERC are reserved exclusively for groundbreaking research projects deemed of excellence.

Professor Paul Steinmann and his team will research magneto-sensitive elastomers – a new category of intelligent materials which are comprised of a rubber-like substrate, charged with magnetic particles. For the rapid and, above all, targeted deformation of these materials a weak magnetic field is sufficient. It is precisely this characteristic that makes magneto-sensitive elastomers so interesting for numerous practical applications including industrial process measurement and control, whereby elastomers convert electronic signals into movement – much the same as muscles do.

Over the next five years, Professor Paul Steinmann and his team will research the connection between the production process, the subsequent microstructure and the properties of magneto-sensitive elastomers by means of experiments, models and simulations. The research team ultimately hopes to better exploit the promising potential afforded by these new materials for future technological applications.

Profile: Paul Steinmann

Paul Steinmann conducts research in the field of non-linear continuum mechanics and computational mechanics and is active, inter alia, in the Erlangen Engineering of Advanced Materials (EAM) Cluster of Excellence. The core of his scientific research focuses on the modelling and simulation of the mechanical and non-mechanical behaviour of innovative materials and structures. Professor Steinmann has been head of the Institute of Applied Mechanics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the FAU since 2007. He was awarded the Fellow Award from the European Mechanics Society (EuroMech) and the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM) in 2006 for his scientific contributions.

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uni | media service | news No. 282/2011 on 3.11.2011