Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Materials Systems featured

February 27, 2023

By Mary Fetzer

Editor’s Note: Read the full story on the Penn State One Community Impacting Many, a website. Zoubeida Ounaies, professor of mechanical engineering, was featured.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The coming decades present a host of challenges for built environments, including a rising global population, increasing urbanization, crumbling infrastructure and climate change. To become more livable for more people, smart materials will need to become smarter, adapting and responding to what’s going on around them.

The Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Materials Systems (LiMC²), a partnership between Penn State and the University of Freiburg in Germany, is working across departments and continents to engineer adaptive, self-powering, living materials that respond to their environment. The center was recently featured in a video story on the Penn State’s One Community Impacting Many website.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all materials, including these walls around us, the doors, the tables, were capable of more than one thing?” said Zoubeida Ounaies, director of LiMC², professor of mechanical engineering and associate director of the Materials Research Institute. “What if the door was also the screen of a computer? What if these walls had the ability to control the climate of the room without needing the ducts and the heating and cooling system that is housed somewhere else in this building?”