Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials

The Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials (Max-Planck-Institut für Nachhaltige Materialien) is a research institute of the Max Planck Society located in Düsseldorf. Since 1971, it has been legally independent and organized in the form of a GmbH, which was formerly supported and financed in equal parts by the Max Planck Society and the Steel Institute VDEh. The Max Planck Society has been the sole shareholder since 2020.

History
The institute was founded in 1917 as Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Iron Research in Aachen, with Fritz Wüst being the founding director. It moved to Düsseldorf in 1921 and relocated from the "Rheinische Metallwaarenfabrik" to its current location in 1935. In 1943, it moved temporarily to Clausthal and in 1946 back to Düsseldorf.

The long-term institutional co-sponsoring by Steel Institute VDEh determined a unique example of a public private partnership for both the Max Planck Society and European industry and was intended to ensure a close link between knowledge-oriented and pre-competitive basic research on the one hand and commercial relevance on the other.

After the VDEh had reduced its annual subsidies since 2016 due to structural problems in the steel industry and completely terminated the financing agreement in October 2019 with effect from 31 December 2021, it transferred all shares to the Max Planck Society in March 2020, making it the sole shareholder. In April 2024, the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research was renamed the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials.

Fields of research
The Institute plays a central role in enabling progress in the fields of mobility (e.g. steels and soft magnets for light-weight hybrid vehicles and Ni-base alloys for plane turbines), energy (e.g. efficiency of thermal power conversion through better high temperature alloys and nanostructured solar cells), infrastructure (e.g. steels for large infrastructures, e.g. wind turbines and chemical plants), and safety (e.g. nanostructured bainitic steels for gas pipelines). The Institute with its international team of about 300 employees is organized in four departments:


 * Computational Materials Design (Prof. Jörg Neugebauer)
 * Interface Chemistry and Surface Engineering (Prof. Jörg Neugebauer, temporarily while Prof. Martin Stratmann is on leave)
 * Microstructure Physics and Alloy Design (Prof. Dierk Raabe)
 * Structure and Nano-/Micromechanics of Materials (Prof. Gerhard Dehm)

In addition to departmental research, certain research activities are of common interest within the MPIE. These central research areas are highly interdisciplinary and combine the experimental and theoretical expertise available in the different departments.

The six main cross-disciplinary topics are:
 * Sustainability and decarburization
 * Artificial intelligence and digitalisation
 * Materials under harsh conditions
 * Innovative materials
 * Microstructure and properties
 * Advanced methods

In many of these areas the Institute holds a position of international scientific leadership, particularly in multiscale materials modeling, surface science, metallurgical alloy design, and advanced structure characterization from atomic to macroscopic scales of complex engineering and functional materials.

Literature

 * Adolf von Harnack: Rede zur Weihe des Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituts für Eisenforschung. 1921, In: Adolf von Harnack . Wissenschaftspolitische Reden und Aufsätze. zusammengestellt und herausgegeben von Bernhard Fabian, Olms-Weidmann, Hildeheim-Zürich-New York 2001, ISBN 3-487-11369-4 (German).
 * Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Hrsg.): Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung, Reihe: Berichte und Mitteilungen der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft 1993/5, ISSN 0341-7778 (German).