Hydrogen is the energy carrier of the future and is expected to help Germany become climate-neutral by 2045. To this end, hydrogen is gradually being added to fuel gases such as natural gas and fed into existing gas turbines, for example.

Modern high-performance steels achieve high strengths and yet behave ductile. This is made possible, among other things, by combining different microstructural modifications within one material. Due to the high strength, however, these steels are susceptible to hydrogen-induced damage, whereby the influence of the individual microstructural components on the global material behavior is not precisely known.

Additive manufacturing places special demands on the materials to be processed. Novel alloy concepts are therefore being developed specifically for additive manufacturing processes, including alternatives to conventional starting materials such as pre-alloyed, gas-atomized powders.

Medical technology products are subject to the most stringent requirements. Among other things, they must not corrode and must often be radiopaque for use. All this depends on the selection of the right materials. Therefore, structural materials, new functional coatings and the characterization of innovative design patterns for use in medical technology will be considered.

Making resource-intensive products obsolete, extending product life cycles, enabling re-functionalization through materials science, returning resources to the materials cycle: These are all approaches to a Circular Economy (CE) that we are researching, for example by upcycling metallic microchips.

Only with a comprehensive insight into microscopic behavior can the material solutions of the future be developed. To this end, we use state-of-the-art methods to investigate the micromechanical properties of individual phases and of microstructures on the mesoscopic scale.

Every aspect of science is fundamentally data-based, including materials science and engineering. We systematically generate, store, manage and analyze materials data and metadata. This enables us and true multi-scale, tailored material design.