DELIVER – Data-driven Engineering of Sustainable Living Materials

DELIVER is inspired by the ability of living organisms to generate materials with special properties. It is a novel concept at the interface of materials science, synthetic biology and data science for the efficient design of wood-based multi-material systems with desired properties in terms of mechanics, density or optical appearance.

Wood waste can be converted by bacteria and built up into new materials. This process can be controlled by means of external stimuli such as light, allowing the generation of different material properties adapted to specific requirements. The central step in this process is cellular information processing, which ultimately decides how external stimuli are interpreted and which material properties are subsequently formed.

Based on a material library, it should be possible by means of machine learning to specifically generate and optimize material for e.g. furniture or wood construction with the desired properties - energy-efficiently and cost-effectively.