IEEE Future Directions
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Pollution eating buildings
Smart materials are likely to characterise the coming decades. They are being designed to carry out a variety of functions, like sensing, interacting, changing their shape and even eating up pollution.
There are a number of companies already offering smart materials for construction that can adsorb CO2 and particulate. One of them is Prosolve 370e. They produce modular tiles that can be used to cover a building facade. The tiles are layered with a titanium dioxide compound that with the help of light (UV light present in Sun’s rays) decompose NO and volatile pollution into harmless compounds generating water and carbon dioxide.
Another company, see image, is Studio Roosegaarde, with architects designing a variety of systems for cleaning air, removing particulate. One https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/artificial-plants-mof-carbon-dioxide-fuel-global-warming-reduce-climate-change-greenhouse-gases-a7703156.htmlof their creation, the smog free tower has been tested in Beijing, a notoriously polluted city. Unfortunately the results have not been convincing.
Artificial plants are also being tested for removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
It will surely take a few more decades before coming to an effective, affordable solutions, Looking at 2040 for that seems reasonable.
New Materials
Related to “smart materials” are the new materials having special characteristics that were never observed before. Take as an example Vantablack, produced by Surrey Nanosystems in UK. A surface painted with Vantablack absorbe all incident light, hence our eyes see it as black. Notice in the image that a wrinkled foil has been painted with Vantablack and in that area it seems completely flat. That would not be the case if you paint that same foil with a normal black pain. You will notice different hues of black due to reflection of light by the wrinkled foil. That material was developed for application in astronomy where no light reflection is desirable (e.g. for telescopes on orbiting satellites).
We can expect a variety of new materials coming up in the coming decades and by 2040 it should be possible to design a material with the desired characteristics at will.
Bio-plastic
A special case of new materials is bio-plastic. Plastic has changed our world, for good and for worse, since it was invented in in the last century using petroleum components. The first kind of plastic was actually invented in the previous century, around 1861, and it was a bio-plastic being based on cellulose. Its success, however, is tied to the last century and to the creation of materials based on oil derivate. The good thing is that plastic is very resistant to wear and tear you can keep using it, the bad thing is that plastic is very resistant to wear and tear – you cannot get rid of it!
On the contrary, bio-plastic can have similar characteristics in terms of use but can be recycled and it is biodegradable.
We already have a few companies offering bio-plastic, like Green Dot Bioplastic, and we are already using bio-degradable bags for our grocery shopping but today’s bio-plastic has not reached to point of performances and affordability to be able to replace present plastic in all its variety of uses (and there are tons of them).
By 2040 the Imperial College foresees the complete replacement of oil-based plastic by bio-plastic.
4-dimensional materials
At MIT’s Self Assembling Lab a team of researchers worked to create materials that can self-assemble. Stratasys, a company working on 3D printing, is ready to take the plunge and explore the possibilities offered by these new materials. So far the self assembling is very limited and takes place in water (that decreases the effort needed for moving the various pieces), it is more like an entertaining demonstration.
However, give it a few more decades and self assembling may become an essential component of future systems and of course will be capable of much more complex types of assembling.
If we look forward to the advent of autonomous systems, one of their desirable characteristics will be the capability to generate offsprings and evolve. That will also benefit from the capability of materials to self-assemble.
