News

The prestigious journal Advanced Materials has just accepted our work on on “Recording Temperature with Magnetic Supraparticles”!

We are happy to welcome Andreas Zink as new PhD canditate in our group. Andi has already conducted his masters thesis in our group and we are glad to have him for a few more years. In his thesis he will combine inorganic nanoparticle building blocks with organic chemistry in supraprticles to investi...

Dr. Susanne Wintzheimer has been selected as Klaus Tschira Boost Fund Fellow. Congratulations Susanne!

Find out more in the news post by the department, here. 

Our latest work on Supraparticles for Bare-Eye H2 Indication and Monitoring, published in Advanced Functional Materials, has attracted great national and international media interest, including a citation in wikipedia.

Here is a summary of articles reporting on our work:

And another article is about to be published: together with our Fraunhofer colleagues, we just got accepted:

Stefan Lange, Bastian Fett, Angelika Hähnel, Alexander Müller, Bettina Herbig, Volker Naumann, Gerhard Sextl, Karl Mandel, Christian Hagendorf*
Thin film formation of wet chemically depos...

In our latest work, accepted by Nano letters, we report on supraparticles with a unique ID that can report damage on a surface – our particles start to be really smart 🙂 Find out more, here.

Imagine a surface that can report on damage via a color change. Supraparticles can provide this functionality as we demonstrate in our latest article published in Small. Find out more, here.

In a huge collaboration work involving several groups at FAU, we were able to develop and to mechanistically understand a functional supraparticle to make hydrogen visible for bare eye detection. Read more on this, here.

So far, we succeeded in making particles that carry a unique optical or a unique magnetic ID. In our latest work, we demonstrate that also a combination of an optical ID and a magnetic ID within a single particle can be achieved! Find out more, here.

Last year, we demonstrated that a single supraparticle can carry a unique optical ID. This year, we demonstrate that it is even possible in an all optical system to overlay a second ID and hide a first one and reveal both! Just accepted in Advanced Optical Materials. Read more, here.

Citric acid modification of iron oxide nanoparticles is often conducted but rarely closely looked at. We shed light on this in our latest article just accepted in Particle, entitled “The Significant Influence of the pH Value on Citrate Coordination upon Modification of Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide N...

With spray-drying, one can not only join nanoparticles, but also do chemistry in a droplet and crystallize MOFs from molecular precursors in presence of magnetic nanoparticles.

The result is a strongly luminescent magnet! More details, here.

Small methods just accepted our collaboration work with the Bachmann group  and the Thommes group at FAU: “Spray-drying and Atomic Layer Deposition: Complementary Tools Towards Fully Orthogonal Control of Bulk Composition and Surface Identity of Multifunctional Supraparticles”. Find out more, here.

Andreas has recieved a doctoral scholarship from the Cusanuswerk for his Ph.D. thesis on Interactive magnetic supraparticles in dynamic fluidic environments and their application in water purification and battery recycling processes.

The group is constantly growing at both places (Erlangen and Würzburg).

Find both images here.

We just got funded a new BMBF project aiming towards contributing to battery recycling. Find out more in the press release by the FAU here. 

Our magnetic markers are outlined in an article in “Nachrichten aus der Chemie”

Stephan Müssig, Karl Mandel

Magnetische Marker

Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2021, 69, 10, 45-48.

Jakob Reichstein was just awarded with a best oral presentation diploma in the section Nanochemistry and Nanomaterials of the Mendeleev conference 2021 held in St. Petersburg, where several members of our group took part remotely and gave talks.

We co-authored a paper with the Fraunhofer ISC which reports that abrasive blasting of lithium metal surfaces yields clean and 3D structured lithium metal anodes with superior properties for batteries. The article just got accepted by Energy Technologies and can be found here.

Our article Overcoming the Inhibition Effects of Citrate: Precipitation of Ferromagnetic Magnetite Nanoparticles with Tunable Morphology, Magnetic Properties and Surface Charge via Ferrous Citrate Oxidation is featured as back cover in Particle & Particle Systems Characterization.

Our article Communicating Particles: Identification Taggant and Temperature Recorder in One Single Supraparticle is featured as frontispiece in Advanced Functional Materials.

Our recent article about a single magnetic particle with nearly unlimited encoding options was featured as an inside back cover of Small.

You can find the article here.

Advanced Functional Materials just accepted our work, in which we demonstrate for the first time the successful design of a true communicating particle which not only carries a unique ID but also a recorder functionality all in one entity. The full title is: “Communicating Particles: Identification ...

Citrates are very often used to surface-functionalize iron oxide nanoparticles after their synthesis. However, they are not employed directly during synthesis as it is commonly observed that they inhibit the precipitation of the iron species. In our latest paper, which was just accepted by Particle ...

We managed to create a single magnetic particle with over 77 billion encoding options. A breakthrough towards an all magnetic ID! The work can be found here.

Agglomeration of magnetic nanoparticles in dispersion cannot only be controlled upon temperature change but this can also be measured in situ via magnetic particle spectroscopy! More detailed infromation can be found here.
Great collaboration with the group of Tobias Kraus and the Fraunhofer IIS .
...

Spray-drying nanoparticles is not only interesting to create supraparticles. It is also a way to generate solid-filled aerosols. The process is a model to what happens when humans cough or sneeze virus particles such as SARS-CoV-2. Using harmless fluorescent silica-based virus analogues, it can easi...

Our artwork regarding our latest review article "Supraparticles for Sustainability" published in Advanced Functional Materials was chosen as frontispiece art.

we are pleased to welcome Andreas Wolf, a familiar face, to our group as a PhD candidate. His work will focus on interactive magnetic supraparticles, where magnetic markers are used to monitor the separation of battery active materials and additives.

Welcome Andreas!

We are delighted to share that Dr. Rosa Pujales-Paradela, member of our group, has been recognized with the Outstanding Merit Doctoral Award for her thesis "Innovative Smart Probes for Molecular Imaging Applications" by the 2018-2019 Doctoral Awards Tribunal of the consortium Physics and Chemistry p...

We are happy to welcome a new member to our working group. From now on Thomas Zimmermann will be conducting his PhD at the Particle Technology Group at the Fraunhofer ISC in Würzburg. Welcome, Thomas.

The manuscript of Andreas Wolf (Fraunhofer ISC part of the group and in future also in our group at FAU) et al. on centrifugation based separation of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and carbon black for lithium-ion battery recycling  was just accepted in Chemical Engineering and Processing - Process In...

The New Year 2021 starts with acceptance in Advanced Functional Materials of our new Review Article on "Supraparticles for Sustainability".
In this Review Article, our group outlined the power of supraparticles to contribute to sustainability - including a definition of sustainability derived from ...

Just accepted for publication: Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) from the Beuerle Group meet magnetic particles:

Roberto Sanchez Naya, Vladimir Stepanenko, Karl Mandel, Florian Beuerle*
Modulation of Crystallinity and Optical Properties in Composite Materials Combining Iron Oxide Nano...

By using only simple chemicals along with carefully controlling synthesis parameters, a whole zoo of different magnetic iron oxide particle types can be obtained as demonstrated by Tim Granath et. al. in our work that was just accepted by Particle and Particle Systems Characterization, entitled Oxid...

Everyone knows barcodes to store information and scratchcards to hide information. In our latest work, just accepted in Advanced Optical Materials, Franziska Miller et al. transfer these well-known principles to the supraparticle world to generate a supraparticle-based five-level-identification tag ...

Our research on „the  all white magnet” was selected as cover in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C.

Our research on abrasion indicator supraparticles is highlighted as cover in Advanced Photonics Research.

Group photo of the year 2020 – due to Corona safety measures this year via zoom screenshot.

We are happy to welcome Huanhuan Zhou, who has taken the long journey from China to support us in our scientific work as PhD student from now on. Her work will focus on the development of ID and recorder supraparticles. Welcome, Huanhuan.

Magnetic materials are always black! Really? Not necessarily: together with the group of Klaus Müller-Buschbaum we demonstrate that it is possible to design an all white magnet, based on a complex supraparticle. Read about it in J. Mater. Chem. C where our article was just accepted (https://pubs.rsc...

Congratulations to Sarah, Tim, Johannes and Susanne: Their article on "Abrasion indicators for smart surfaces based on a luminescence turn-on effect in supraparticles" was just accepted in the new journal of Wiley`s "Advanced" series: Advanced Phontonics Research!

Please have a look:  https://on...

We are happy to welcome a new member to our working group. From now on Philipp Groppe will support us in our scientific work as PhD student. His work will focus on the development of porous supraparticles via spray-drying. Welcome, Philipp.

Franziska was accepted as a participant in the FAU mentoring programme ARIADNETechNat, which is designed for high potential female postdoctoral researchers, doctoral candidates and Masters’s students at the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Sciences. Mentoring by an experienced and independe...

Max Buchner Research Foundation founded by DECHEMA awarded one of this year’s scholarships to Susanne for the project “Creation of Janus particles via spray-drying” running from 01.07.2020 until 30.06.2021. Furthermore Susanne is one of the year 2020 scholarship-holders of Christiane Nüsslein-Volhar...

Jakob  received a doctoral scholarship from The German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU) for his planed PhD work where he tries to develop recorder supraparticles for monitoring harmful environmental triggers as a key component for a more sustainable circular economy also for complex products l...

We are happy to welcome a new member to our working group. From now on Dr. Rosa Pujales-Paradela will support us in our scientific work as postdoc. Welcome, Rosa.

We are pleased to announce that our new spray-dryer, friendly provided by Büchi, is now fully up and running.

We have arrived safe and sound in beautiful Erlangen and are looking forward to an exciting time with new challenges at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. However before we can continue with our research we will first set up the lab.

Prof. Dr. Karl Mandel new at the department of chemistry and pharmacy FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.