Materials research centre starts work at Ruhr University

Ruhr University Bochum, home of the new centre.

“For us as a steel producer in North Rhine-Westphalia, the opening of this institute is a groundbreaking event,” said Karl-Ulrich Köhler, Executive Board Chairman of ThyssenKrupp Steel AG.

ThyssenKrupp is the lead company in the industrial consortium, which includes Bayer MaterialScience and Bayer Technology Services, Salzgitter Mannesmann Forschung and Bosch that is financing ICAMS. The remainder of the funding comes from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

ICAMS will use multi-scale computer simulation to develop new materials. This approach brings together previously separate worlds of natural science and engineering science.

Innovative products require new materials, and materials with tailored properties. To develop cars which are fuel-efficient and safe, the automotive industry needs high-strength steels for lighter designs.

One problem with describing real materials is the high spatial and chemical complexity of these structures on widely varying length, time and energy scales. There is still a tendency to regard components as homogeneous units. But to find out what happens inside the material under mechanical loads, the microstructure, made up of individual atoms, crystallites and their interfaces and defects, has to be taken into account. Simulations make it possible to develop new materials and to realistically predict and better understand their

Key areas of work at ICAMS will focus on, the properties of interfaces and layer adhesion; processes taking place inside the material during heavy forming operations, such as during the stamping or rolling of metal; and the influence of alloying elements on the properties of steel.

The three endowed professors at ICAMS, Ralf Drautz, Alexander Hartmaier and Ingo Steinbach and their teams, will also collaborate with experimental facilities at the Ruhr University Bochum and with researchers from the chemistry, mathematics, mechanical engineering and physics faculties.

In addition to research, ICAMS will enhance the teaching of material sciences. “The fact that today the multi-scale modeling of materials still means tearing down barriers between traditional disciplines also means that there are not yet any engineers who have been taught to derive and understand properties of materials from their atomic structures,” said Drautz, ICAMS founding director. “We’ll be creating a masters degree course to educate a new generation of material engineers who will grow up in a multi-scale world rather than restricting their focus to just one discipline.”