EAM Starting Grants 2025/2026 awarded
In this years call, the Executive Board of the FAU Competence Center EAM decided to award one new EAM Starting Grants. The EAM Starting Grant aims to support young researchers to pursue their own research projects and thus gaining a boost for a successful academic career. The grant is intended to bring new contributions and ideas into FAU EAM’s research activities and serves as seed funds for the preparation of new proposals.
More information on the EAM Starting Grants: https://www.eam.fau.eu/research/eam-starting-grants/
For 2025-26 the following proposal was chosen:
Bio-inspired Flexoelectric Architected Materials
Dr. Miguel Angel Moreno-Mateos
Current engineering applications of flexoelectric materials are limited, partly due to the added complexity of the electro-mechanical coupling, which is rather limited to small flexoelectric coefficients. The extreme deformation of the individual components of a metastructured lattice promises amplified flexoelectric responses. However, metastructures and flexoelectricity are typically studied independently with their intersection only marginally understood. Processes in nature based in flexoelectric coupling are a source of inspiration. Among others, flexoelectricity in bones—a metastructured material akin to a porous sponge—has been shown to be on the base of bone repairing processes and some theories sustain that waves in neurons and axons obey flexoelectric thermodynamical events. As for engineered materials, silicone-based metastructured polymers subject to time-changing mechanical deformation can generate useful flexoelectric currents. The project BIOFLEX is grounded on the hypothesis that flexoelectricity can be also identified as electrical and mechanical signals (high frequency and small amplitude) and that their coupling can enable new ways to modulate them. This project seeks to uncover new phenomena and innovative multi-physics with experimental and computational frameworks and to push the boundaries with flexoelectric metastructures applied to, e.g., digital computation by mechanical means and sensing devices.
Contact: miguel.moreno@fau.de