On Thursday, 20 June 2024, we were able to go on another excursion to Hanau on the topic: Magnetic materials and applications! In the morning, we visited the Fraunhofer Institute for Materials Recycling and Resource Strategy IWKS in Hanau. Here we learnt about the current state of research and development on the topic of "Recycling permanent magnets" and got a very good impression during a guided tour of the laboratory. It was exciting to see how permanent magnets are removed from various applications such as electric motors or wind turbines (in some cases using robots) and recycled using different strategies. The topic of the criticality of elements was also discussed.

In the afternoon, the tour continued to Magnotherm in Darmstadt. Magnotherm GmbH is a very young company: a start-up founded by former doctoral students from TU Darmstadt. They develop refrigerators that cool using the magnetocaloric effect. Here we learnt the basics about magnetocalorics, but also about founding a company and working in such a dynamic environment. The highlight was magnetocaloric cooled drinks!

Many thanks to Mr Schönfeldt and Mr Opelt at Fraunhofer IWKS and Mr Gutfleisch and Ms von Oesterreich at Magnotherm for the great excursion!

To the LinkedIn post from the Functional Materials of TU Darmstadt

Greetings from Gran Canaria! Our PhD student Michael Staiger was in Gran Canaria in the week around Whitsun at the conference of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI for short). He had the chance to present parts of his master thesis to an expert audience on 20 May.

This Monday, Prof Gabi Schierning opened the Pint of Science Festival in Duisburg and Essen with her lecture. The Pint of Science Festival brings science into pubs and aims to increase communication between researchers and non-researchers. In Duisburg, the festival takes place in the Finkenkrug. In her presentation, Gabi took stock of the current state of the energy transition and what materials we will need in the future for the energy transition.

Hamta Mansouri is our new scholarship holder! She studied materials science and metallurgy in Iran and will be working on the transport properties of agglomerated nanoparticles made from recycled silicon during her one-year scholarship.

Our doctoral students Inci Sahin and Susanne Kunzmann attended the spring conference of the German Physical Society (DPG) this year and had a lively exchange with other researchers. As part of INNOMAG e.V., Inci had the opportunity to present the topic of her Master's thesis at the DPG.

Inci Sahin is our new PhD student! She studied NanoEngineering here at the University of Duisburg-Essen and will be working on quantum transport materials as potential electrodes for hydrogen catalysis as part of her doctorate.

Daniela Willemsen took up the position of team assistant in our working group at the beginning of this year. We are very much looking forward to working together and all that we will achieve this year!

We finally have a fully equipped kitchen!

This Monday was the first general meeting of the Research Centre for Future Energy Materials and Systems (RC FEMS) at the Ruhr University Bochum. We had an interesting exchange with the other research groups and look forward to working closely together.

The University Alliance (UA) Ruhr celebrated the opening of the Research Alliance Ruhr in Essen on 24 October with around 100 guests from politics and science. Founded in 2021 on the initiative of the Ruhr Conference, 50 joint research professorships will be created here to address pressing issues of the future. Science Minister Ina Brandes honoured the successful collaboration between Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the University of Duisburg-Essen and TU Dortmund University.

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Article by Deutschlandfunk

The BoKoMaT_8 2023 conference on shape memory alloys offers a wide range of specialist presentations, discussion panels and space for mutual exchange. Gabi Schierning presented the group's work on the electronic causes of the martensitic phase transition in the shape memory alloy NiTi at this conference.

The move to Duisburg is done, everything went well - equipment and team have arrived!

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The Titanic broke apart when it collided with the iceberg. One of several reasons for the disaster: the steel used was extremely brittle. So-called phase transitions in the solid state explain this brittleness of metals. Triggered by temperature changes, material properties can change, as in the collision with the iceberg. Today, a different steel would be used because science knows more about these phase transitions. Experts from the fields of materials science, physics and engineering are researching them. Under the leadership of UDE Professor Gabi Schierning, an article has now been published in Advanced Energy Materials that takes an interdisciplinary look at the field and sets out future research goals.

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to the publication

Together with the scientific organisers Prof. Dr. Andreas Hütten and Prof. Dr. Kai Rossnagel, we were able to hold the 784th seminar of the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation, which had the theme "Microstructure, Magnetic and Electronic Ordering: Interplay and Interactions". The programme, consisting of a total of 21 invited lectures and two poster sessions with excellent contributions, was followed by around 60 active researchers from various research fields. Highlights of the high-calibre seminar were the contributions by Anna Böhmer on electronically driven structural phase transitions in iron-based superconductors, Claus Ropers on ultrafast electron microscopy and diffraction and Dennis Meier on the properties of ferroelectric domain walls.

Further information on the seminar