From a sustainable perspective and concern about environmental impact, renewable bio-based and biodegradable materials need to be developed to replace unsustainable, non-biodegradable or hazardous synthetic materials on the market, such as petroleum-based materials. Fungal-based materials are an upcoming class of these materials usually made from the mycelium of filamentous fungi.
In this study, we propose a new and simple approach for enhancing and tailoring the mechanical characteristics of fungal mycelium mats, grown by liquid-state surface fermentation, by depositing patterns of biopolymers on the fungal mycelium mats.
We can show a notable improvement of the tensile properties, but less as expected from the rule of mixture. To evaluate this we investigate the adhesion and microstructure by SEM, which reveals a possible improvement regarding the fibre-matrix adhesion due to an additional mycelium layer. Two different compostable biopolymers were used, which show different properties upon extrusion resulting in differing final geometries and surface roughness of the reinforcement.
This approach might build the foundation for sustainable load-path optimized biocomposites for various applications