The Institute
New Institute Structure at IBF
In light of current and future challenges in materials engineering, the IBF is structurally reorganising and will house two chairs with equal status in the future. In addition to the IBF's existing forming technology activities, which will be concentrated in the Chair of Forming Technologies, the Chair of Material Modelling in Forming Technology will be established under the leadership of Prof. Sebastian Münstermann, who previously has headed the Academic and Research Department of Materials and Structures at RWTH Aachen University. The chairmanship of the joint institute will rotate between the holders of the chairs.
This new IBF structure enables a significant expansion of the IBF topic portfolio. As before, the essential forming process chains will be covered in terms of process and material behaviour in experiment and simulation. Additionally, the performance of components produced by forming technology will now be analysed using multi-scale simulation methods and corresponding testing technology. Through this, the forming processes can be tailored in such a way that the resulting local distributions of the microstructure ensuring the fulfilment of the property profiles quantified for the component. This approach is being addressed in the current funding period of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre Transregio 188 "Damage Controlled Forming Processes".
Almost simultaneously with these changes, new opportunities have arisen for Prof. Hauke Springer, who currently heads the Academic and Research Department Metallic Composites at the IBF. He has received a call to head the Chair of Sustainable Metallurgy of Iron and Steel at our faculty, which will allow him and his team to expand their subject area to include highly topical research fields, such as hydrogen metallurgy, under the roof of the IEHK.
We hope to complete the minor construction, relocation and organisational steps associated with these changes over the summer and look forward to continuing our collaborations in the new structure.
Gerhard Hirt, Sebastian Münstermann and Hauke Springer