As part of the main department of Materials Engineering, the 2021 founded group focusses in the upstream processes in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering. This extends the research possibility in alloy design and completes the entire process chain in metal production and fabrications of the institute.

The research theme of the newly constructed group concentrates at the beginning in liquid metallurgy, i.e., production of steel as well as aluminum melts. A new vacuum induction facility (to be in operation Q4/2022) will produce laboratory melts with a maximum volume of 20 liter by rising and falling casting, by which multiple casting as well as intermediate alloying are possible. It enables even more synergy work with other departments including Melt Atomization and Spray Forming as well as Heat Treatment, Lightweight Materials and Mechanical Properties.

Further equipment for the physical simulation of the industrial-near thermomechanical forming processes such as hot rolling of bar steel and sheet is being conceptualized. According to the plan, industrial intermediate slab and billets can be studied for the effect of various parameters here. Also, the group serves intermediate products for the in-house gear and bearing fabrication and heat treatment. In parallel, the microstructural evolution during thermomechanical-control processes is also investigated by other cutting edge research techniques at other departments at IWT as well as by means of thermokinetics calculation.