International Max Planck Research School for Sustainable Metallurgy

Our structured, three-year doctoral programme, conducted entirely in English, takes an intensive interdisciplinary approach and brings together scientists from across the globe in the Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences-Ruhr-University Bochum metropolitan region of Germany. Metallurgy has provided humankind with materials, tools and the associated progress for more than five millennia. It is not only a huge engineering success story but has also become the biggest single industrial environmental burden of our generation. Disruptive innovations are required for alternative reduction processes that convert mineral ores into metals without today’s carbon-based methods that release huge amounts of CO2. SusMet focuses on the exploration of carbon-free sustainable metallurgy, employing hydrogen as reducing agent, direct electroreduction (electrolysis), and plasma synthesis. Correlated experimental, ab initio and multi-scale techniques are central to our mission: Development and application of advanced simulation techniques to explore and identify the fundamental structures and mechanisms occurring in these materials and their synthesis over all relevant length scales (e.g., cutting-edge ab initio methods, atomistic simulation methods, multi-scale modelling, machine learning) High resolution analysis, monitoring of chemistry, structure and transformations at the atomic scale of buried interfaces and defects by correlated experimental techniques in both space and time (e.g., correlated APT, TEM, FIM, EBIC, EBSD, XPS Kelvin probe microscopy, machine learning augmented analysis techniques) Experimental and computational analysis of transport and the reaction of surfaces and particles with reducing and oxidising gas-phase species (e.g. laser-based imaging diagnostics, setup of model reactors, modelling of underlying reactions, multi-scale simulation of reactive fluids, computational fluid dynamics)