Background Biofiber Tech is a Stockholm-based startup, with the vision to shape a sustainable future. Our innovative & patented technology, constitutes wood fibers more “plastic-like“ so, they can be used for plastic product manufacturing and reduce reliance on fossil-based plastics. The produced materials are implementable in applications within automotive, electronics, household products, and/or other related fields. Biofiber Tech’s sustainable wood fibers can replace up to 51% of all plastics (PE, PP, ABS, PLA, etc.) in a product.
Project desciption
The overuse of fossil-based plastics in modern societies has heavily affected the environment globally. The massive amounts of carbon emissions during their production and their end-of-life by-products make the need to substitute conventional plastics with more sustainable materials urgent. Over the years, huge effort has been undertaken towards this goal. One possible way is to produce Wood Polymer Composites (WPC’s) which can partially replace plastics in everyday applications. Wood fibers, being carbon-negative because of photosynthesis, help lowering the carbon footprint of products. One important limitation of wood fibers is their poor temperature resistance, which limits: i) the operation temperature of the composites, and ii) the processing temperature which significantly limits the number of polymers that wood fibers can be mixed with. Also considering that all high-performance polymers (nylons, PC-ABS, etc) have high melting temperature, and that’s why it is until now not possible to create sustainable solutions based on these polymers by using wood fibers.
Aim The aim of the project is to study the hybridization of wood fibers by using various (nano)materials (e.g., graphene). The thermal stability of the resultant materials will be analysed and utilized the successful candidates to prepare biocomposites with a wide number of polymer matrices. Other type of properties will be furthermore investigated, such as thermal/electrical conductivity etc.
Practical information The project to be conducted at MMK. Supervisor at MMK: professor Jiayin Yuan
Supervisor at Biofiber Tech: Luis Valencia, luis.valencia@biofibertech.com, 0730959260 Please note that this position is not payed. Nevertheless, for the right candidate, the master thesis may result in an employment!