Metallurgy and Materials Science
Metallurgy and Materials Science
Metallurgical materials and the products made from them are the backbone of human civilization since more than 5000 years and nowadays with a daily turnover of 3.5 Billion € in the European Union alone a key driver in our economy. ‘Materials’ are a specific type of matter that is finally used for something, be it a product or process. Therefore, materials science has generally both a basic and an applied facet.
Nowadays, after virtually thousands of years of development, we still use only about 1000 different types of metallic alloys out of a sheer infinite combinatorial space of about 1060 possible combinations when considering only the 50-60 most frequently used elements from the periodic system. This means that we stand at the beginning and not at the end of metallurgical research.
In industry, materials advances can drive the creation of new products or even new industries, but stable industries also employ materials scientists to make incremental improvements and troubleshoot issues with currently used materials. Industrial applications of materials science include materials design, cost-benefit tradeoffs in industrial production of materials, processing methods (casting, rolling, welding, corrosion, surface engineering, etc.), test and analyzing like hardness, wear resistance, tensile and compression strength, corrosion, surface engineering, etc, and characterization methods such as electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, calorimetry, metallugraphy ans so on.
Our materials engineers are adept at understanding how the history of a material (its processing) influences its structure, and thus the material's properties and performance. Our underlining goal is to develop methodologies that enable stretching the limits of performance of existing materials, or designing and creating new materials for performance specific applications utilizing sustainable processes based on bottom-up or top-down approaches and strategic use of raw materials.