System-based product design: an integrative paradigm for the realisation of sustainable and scalable functional nanomaterials Siddharth Patwardhan, Robert Pilling University of Sheffield, UK Despite an explosion in nanomaterials discovery, with many potential applications, very few have been commercialised. Barriers lie with scalability (not feasible or loss in performance upon scale-up), economics (not enough added value for the potential cost) and sustainability (manufacturing not eco-friendly, and energy and resource intensive hence expensive and wasteful). The gulf is well illustrated by the global silica market: annual production is over 3 million tonnes but is dominated by mature and low value products. Meanwhile a raft of ‘highly promising’ higher value materials have so far failed to meet their promise, or indeed to escape the laboratory. Commercial manufacturing of sustainable and scalable high-value silica nanomaterials remains elusive. Addressing these barriers requires new synthetic methods. It also requires research mindsets capable of rapidly and efficiently navigating complex research pathways, thereby avoiding the pitfalls and dead-ends currently so common. The development of the bioinspired silica (BIS) product system provides a potential solution to these challenges for porous silica materials. BIS is a versatile and greener route with the prospect of good scalability, attractive process economics and well controlled product materials. Importantly, the potential of the system lies not only in its provision of specific lead materials but also, as itself, a rich design-space for the flexible and potentially predictive design of diverse sustainable silica nanomaterials. Importantly, realising the potential of this design space, requires an integrative mind-set, which enables parallel and responsive progression of multiple and dependent research strands, according to need, opportunities, and emergent knowledge. This mind-set sits at odds with the traditional view, which focuses initially on the discovery of specific material leads at the laboratory scale, leaving scale-up, commercialization, and, potentially, pathway understanding to be considered as distinctly separate and disconnected concerns. Here we demonstrate a novel integrative research paradigm arising from our work on bioinspired silica. The approach engenders the system-mindset required for more effective material development. In this way, we identify future challenges for BIS and provide a foundation for the development of new research avenues and more broadly, we evaluate wider application to other nanomaterial systems and also identify adaptable benefits to be gained by applying this style of system-thinking at different stages of the research process (including: design, planning, implementation, publications and impact). References 1. ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2022, 10, 37, 12048–1206
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