We are pleased to announce that Yong Ding and Ingo Burgert from the ETH Zurich (CH) will both give the SFB 1313 Pretty Porous Science Lecture #64 on "Harnessing wood's hierarchical porous structure for carbon-negative and sustainable building materials".
Date: Tuesday, 1 April 2025
Time: 2 pm CET
Speaker: Prof. Ingo Burgert and Dr. Yong Ding, ETH Zurich (CH)
Lecture title: "Harnessing wood's hierarchical porous structure for carbon-negative and sustainable building materials"
Place: Multi Media Lab (MML), U1.003, Pfaffenwaldring 61, 70569 Stuttgart, Campus Vaihingen. If you are interested in participating in the lecture online, please contact samaneh.vahiddastjerdi@mechbau.uni-stuttgart.de
Abstract
Reducing atmospheric CO₂ is crucial for mitigating climate change and ensuring a sustainable future. The building sector is a major contributor, consuming 40% of global raw materials and accounting for 35% of global energy consumption. As a result, there is a growing demand for more sustainable building materials. In this regard, wood emerges as a material of significant potential. Its hierarchical porous structure is an amazing result of evolutionary optimization. Wood is strong and lightweight at the same time, a combination of properties highly desirable in the building sector. Moreover, the unique porous structure of wood makes it an ideal scaffolding substrate for embedding chemical agents and developing hybrid composite materials. This presentation will focus on utilizing the hierarchical structure of wood as a scaffold in a top-down approach to develop functional wood-based composites. By making use of wood’s inherent directional porosity and combining it with structural and chemical modifications, the wood scaffold can be equipped with novel functionalities. Finally, combining the wood scaffold with mineral sequestration for CO₂ storage will be discussed.
About Yong Ding
Yong Ding obtained her doctoral degree from ETH Zurich in 2023, where her doctoral research focused on developing functionalized wood materials. Currently, she is leading the ‘Wood for Smart Buildings’ and ‘Wood for Carbon Storage’ Research Streams in the Wood Materials Science group at ETH Zurich and Empa. Her research is dedicated to advancing functional wood composites toward sustainable, energy-efficient smart building applications. Dr. Ding's expertise lies in sustainable and carbon-negative building materials, focusing on enhancing the functionality and life cycle efficiency of wood-based composites.
About Ingo Burgert
Ingo Burgert has been a Professor of Wood Materials Science at ETH Zurich and Empa, since 2011. He studied wood science and technology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and obtained a doctoral degree at the same university in 2000. From 2000 to 2003 he worked as a postdoc at the Institute of Physics and Materials Science of BOKU, the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. From 2003 to 2011, Ingo was a research group leader of the “Plant Biomechanics and Biomimetics” group at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in the Department of Biomaterials, Potsdam, Germany.