Mycoustics, Myx Sail, Myco Lutions: Next Gen Mycelium Materials

Mushrooms are healthy, mushrooms taste delicious! What we know as “mushrooms”, however, only refers to the fruiting stem. For interior designers and furniture makers, however, what mushrooms do in the soil or wood to obtain nutrients is much more exciting. The so-called fungal mycelium refers to the entirety of all hyphae, i.e. the thread-like cells of a fungus, whose growth guarantees the survival of a fungus in nature. By specifically influencing the growth processes of the hyphae and the growth of the fungal mycelium into molded parts, start-ups, material producers and designers worldwide have succeeded in using fungi in a particularly sustainable process to produce biocircular materials for packaging, textiles, material panels or entire pieces of furniture. The potential is so great that even research institutions are now working on the development of corresponding production technologies for mushroom-based high-tech applications. For example, researchers at empa in Switzerland are working on biodegradable mushroom batteries to power miniature sensors in agriculture and medicine. In the “Mycoustics” project at the Fraunhofer IWU in Dresden, methods of additive manufacturing and 3D printing are currently being combined with findings on the natural growth of mushroom mycelium in order to create both sound-reflecting and sound-absorbing surfaces in a single additive process step and use them for sound-reflecting and sound-absorbing applications.