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The Tuesday feature. In the #diensttalk series, our employees give a brief insight into their activities and reveal what vision drives them. This time, PhD student Micha Philip Fertig provides insights into doctoral studies at Fraunhofer and his research on sustainable solid-state batteries.

The necessary moment for the scale-up of sustainable battery technologies was yesterday. In China, cars with sodium batteries are already on the market. Yet Germany itself is only the blink of an eye away from launching them – if the right course is set now. The decisive aspect here is the intelligent use of regionally and technologically diversified know-how. The ”New Via Regia of Batteries“ holds opportunities.

The Tuesday feature. In the #diensttalk series, our employees give a brief insight into their activities and reveal what vision drives them. This time we follow Dr. Olga Ravkina. As a scientist and group leader, Olga researches ceramic materials and processes for gas separation, such as an environmentally friendly ammonia synthesis route.

Stephan Heilmann develops software for test systems with the aim of ensuring maximum operational reliability – and this job has already taken him high up on wind turbines, on the railways, into the Paris sewers and to the bottom of the sea.

Wear-resistant, electrically or thermally insulating, corrosion-resistant - the demands on component surfaces are very high in many industrial processes and require extreme precision. Atmospheric plasma spraying (APS) is a particularly cost-effective form of thermal spraying which meets the high demands required in industry. The technology has been refined at IKTS for almost thirty years and qualified for various ceramic coatings. Now technologies and know-how are being transferred to commercialization.

Hardmetals will celebrate their 100th anniversary next year and have now been largely optimized. Nevertheless, there are current challenges that lead to novel developments and competitive advantages through higher wear resistance and lower costs, as well as to the efficient use of resources.

How do nanoparticle surfaces react with proteins in blood? How must the surface of the foundation structures of offshore wind turbines be designed to prevent biofilm from growing on them? What properties should the surface of an implant have to grow in well? How to produce customized suspensions for ceramic manufacturing. These are questions that the "Powder and Suspension Characterization" research group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS is addressing. The team provides reliable data for a wide range of topics. The many years of experience in analysis and evaluation are a distinctive feature of the group.

Failures of electronic components or even complete circuit boards can be expensive. Electronics, power electronics and sensor system manufacturers now could use functional ceramic phosphors developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS to determine exactly how hot a defective component has become or where the hotspot was on a printed circuit board. This gives manufacturers advantages in the event of complaints and can contribute significantly to quality improvement and product quality assurance.

Using biomass technologies and nutrient recycling, IKTS researchers are working with partners to develop environmentally friendly and high-yield peat alternatives for edible mushroom cultivation. The focus is on the efficient use of regional renewable raw materials and biogenic residues.

In Germany, almost 70 percent of the energy used in industry is spent on thermal processes. Especially with regard to energy efficiency, CO2 reduction and resource conservation, complex questions must be answered. This almost always involves interactions – for example between temperature, time and gas atmosphere – and what influence these have on product properties and manufacturing processes. The “Thermal Analysis and Thermophysics” working group at Fraunhofer IKTS has been investigating thermal processes for 30 years. Since then, a lot has also happened in the laboratories: The simple measuring instruments with analog data output for thermoanalytical and thermophysical parameters have been replaced by modern, digital equipment. In the course of digitization, data is increasingly being coupled and made usable for modeling thermal processes and component properties.