Established 1917 (1917) Website www.mpie.de Director Dierk Raabe Staff 300 | Research type basic Phone +49 211 67920 Founded 1917 | |
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Field of research materials science & engineering Location Düsseldorf, NRW, Germany Affiliations Max-Planck Gesellschaft
Steel Institute VDEh Address Max-Planck-Straße 1, 40237 Düsseldorf, Germany Similar Max Planck Institute for Coal Res, Max‑Plan für Chemisc, Orth Kluth, VDI Technolo GmbH, Max‑Plan für Gesellsch | ||
The Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung GmbH (MPIE) is a research institute of the Max Planck Society located in Düsseldorf. Since 1971 it is legally independent and organized in the form of a GmbH, owned and financed equally by the Max Planck Society and the Steel Institute VDEh. It conducts basic research on advanced materials, specifically steels and related metallic alloys.
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History
The institute was founded as Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Iron Research in Aachen 1917, with Fritz Wüst being the founding director. It moved 1921 to Düsseldorf and relocated from the "Rheinischen Metallwarenfabrik" to its current location in 1935. In 1943, it move temporarily to Claustahl and in 1946 back to Düsseldorf. The 50% institutional co-sponsoring by industry (by Steel Institute VDEh) determines a unique example of a public private partnership both for the Max-Planck Society and for the European industry and should guarantee a close match between knowledge-oriented and pre-competitive basic research on the one hand and commercial relevance on the other hand.
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:
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 main five cross-disciplinary topics are:
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.