News

X. Fang

Chukwudalu (Dalu) Okafor was awarded the 1st prize in the Best Student Poster Presentation Award during the EMA 2025 (Electronic Materials and Applications, Denver, Colorado, USA), an international conference focused on fundamental properties and processing of (electro) ceramic materials and their applications, hosed by the American Ceramic Society’s Electronics and Basic Science Divisions.

The work Dalu presented is on point defects - dislocations interaction in functional oxides.

Congratulations, Dalu!

Since 2017, the TRR 188 has been working at the TU Dortmund University, the RWTH Aachen University, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to gain a deeper understanding of forming induced damage processes. The aim is to predict damage quantitatively and influence it, for example, by changing the load path.

Further information on TRR 188 can be found here and at https://trr188.de/index.php/en/

I. Westermann, KIT

In the newly launched EU project NANO-S-MART, researchers at the IAM-MMI are investigating the material cycle of steel production in order to minimize losses in our society's consumption of raw materials in the future with intelligent material design and closed material cycles.

C. Mattheck

The KIT Presidential Board has approved a further extension of Prof. Dr. Claus Mattheck's status as KIT Distinguished Senior Fellow until the end of 2028. With this special award, KIT honors outstanding personalities from science in order to preserve their experience and knowledge even after retirement.

X. Fang

In October, Alexander Frisch, Oliver Preuß and Xufei Fang won the $1,500 Roland B. Snow Award as part of the annual ceramographic poster competition at MS&T24/ACerS (American Ceramic Society) in Pittsburgh (USA).

Alexander is a PhD student in the Dislocations in Ceramics group. He is working within the project MECERDIS on ductile oxides at room temperature and the effects of external fields on dislocation behavior in oxides. We would like to thank the ERC for funding his doctoral project.

X. Fang

Chukwudalu (Dalu) Okafor was awarded the 2nd poster prize at the ECI Conference on Nanomechanical Testing in Materials Research and Development IX (October 2024, Sicily, Italy) - THE nano-/micromechanics conference for the relevant community.

Dalu is pursuing his PhD in the group Dislocations in Ceramics and is working on point defects - dislocations interaction in oxides. Funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for his PhD project is gratefully acknowledged.

Maria Vrellou was awarded the "2025 EUROfusion Bernard Bigot Researcher Grant" (ERG) in September. The EUROfusion consortium has awarded a total of sixteen such research grants to talented post-doctoral researchers across Europe. The ERG grants enable young scientists to develop innovative ideas and techniques to advance the EUROfusion roadmap for fusion energy.

Th. Brendel

On September 23rd, Alexandra Wahn successfully defended her dissertation “Partikelbasierte Methoden für die Berechnung von effektiven Transporteigenschaften und Mechanik in granularen Mehrphasen-Elektroden”, written as a part of the DFG Research Training Group GRK 2218 “SiMET-Simulation of mechano-electro-thermal processes in lithium-ion batteries”. Congratulations!

U. Bansal

On June 13th, Eloho Okotete successfully defended her dissertation "Stable crack growth as a strategy to circumvent FIB artefacts in small scale fracture testing". Her work focused on measuring the fracture toughness and interface toughness of materials at the micrometer and submicrometer scale.

Congratulations!

M. Short

Markus Short successfully completed his doctoral thesis “Experimental and Theoretical Developments on Accurately Measuring and Modeling Grain Boundary Diffusion in Solids” with the defense on April 11th. Congratulations!

L. Spatafora

On April 19th, Luigi Spatafora successfully defended his dissertation "Entwicklung eines Metall-Keramik-Verbundes für thermo-mechanisch hochbelastbare Sichtfenster", a project of the Institute for Applied Informatics (IAI), which was co-supervised by the IAM-MMI in materials science. Congratulations!

Xufei Fang started his ERC Starting Grant awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) at IAM-MMI on April 01st, 2024.

His project MECERDIS (funding period 2023.04 to 2028.03) aims to fundamentally understand the mechanisms of dislocations in ceramics and help tailor new functional ceramic materials.

FML

In February, SWR filmed short interviews with Dr. Klaus Hesch (spokesperson FUSION program) and Prof. Dr. Chr. Kirchlechner in the Fusion Materials Laboratory and captured a few impressions of the work on hot cells and the glove boxes.

Fusion research in the state was to provide a framework for a report on the SWR Aktuell Baden-Württemberg program about the Bundestag debate on funding for fusion research on February 23rd.

The program is available in the ARD media library.

M.Breig, KIT

Petra Olschowski, Minister of Science, Research and the Arts in Baden-Württemberg, visited the IAM-MMI's Fusion Materials Laboratory on February 13th, together with Dr. Ronny Feuer (Head of the Department for Mobility, Energy, Aerospace, Industry 4.0) and Alexander Salomon, Member of the Karlsruhe State Parliament.

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded the prestigious Consolidator Grant to Prof. Dr. Christoph Kirchlechner. His project TRITIME aims to fundamentally understand the mechanisms of hydrogen embrittlement and help tailor new materials used in the distribution and storage of hydrogen.