Materials scientists and engineers in Germany can look forward to a healthy injection of funding following the launch of a government program to help stimulate product development using new materials. Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) notes that materials can account for almost half of production costs in the manufacturing industry. And since making innovative materials is slow and expensive (development cycles of 10 to 15 years are not uncommon), the German government is keen to give the process a helping hand. This new program, named “From Material to Innovation,” will run for a decade, providing researchers with about €100 million a year.
According to Herbert Zeisel, Deputy Director-General for Key Technologies for Growth at the BMBF, the program aims to strengthen Germany’s competitiveness and establish materials expertise in German industry. According to BMBF, around 5 million people in the country work in materials-based industries. “The aim is to involve small- and medium-sized enterprises in the innovation process even more heavily than in the past and to train young research talent,” says Zeisel.
He says that they are looking particularly to major fields such as energy, transport, medicine, and construction. Each year the ministry will announce more detailed themes on which each round of funding will be focused. The program will be administered by Project Management Jülich.
This program is part of Germany’s High-Tech Strategy, aimed at making the country a global leader in innovation, and the wider Industrie 4.0, or fourth industrial revolution, which is based around smart factories. It replaces a similar materials initiative that ran in the 10 years leading up to 2014, with €900 million. Funding like this is particularly important in Germany, where commodities tend to be expensive, putting extra pressure on firms to reduce their resource consumption.
More than two-thirds of the companies that received funding under the government’s previous materials research program reported that their ideas had either been or were about to be commercialized. Projects included a ship’s fin made of adaptive fiber-composite materials, which was particularly useful on high seas, and reduced fuel consumption. Another success story was a drill bit made of ultrahigh performance concrete, which improved the speed and cost of driving foundation piles.
Catalyst materials for the chemical industry (courtesy of BASF SE).
Kerstin Schierle-Arndt, a research manager in inorganic materials, and Markus Müller-Neumann, a manager for European innovation policies, both at BASF, agree that government funding in materials development has been a success. They cite in particular its help in developing battery materials for electric vehicles. “Research in electrochemistry and on batteries did not receive much attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As a consequence we lacked talent in electromobility. The funding policy over the last five years helped to develop a renewed vibrant electrochemistry scene in Germany,” says Schierle-Arndt.
Sanjay Mathur, Director of the Institute of Inorganic and Materials Chemistry at the University of Cologne, was among the researchers to benefit from BMBF funding to develop better lithium-ion batteries. He and his team found that they could develop new electrode architectures with high energy densities and less weight by using nanofiber-meshes of lithium iron phosphate. “The BMBF funding and programs are more crucial than ever,” he says.
According to Ferdi Schüth, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, the energy sector could particularly benefit from more funding, given Germany’s ongoing transition to a renewables-based economy, known as the Energiewende (see MRS Bulletin, September 2014 issue). Areas with development potential include photovoltaics, materials for heat storage, and materials that can cope with fluctuating loads.
Schüth says that Germany’s High-Tech Strategy has been a good mechanism for bringing people together to discuss how science can be used for Germany’s economic development. “The political agenda is to have basic academic research translated into products,” he says. However, he also notes that “we have a very good system in Germany for getting companies going with seed money… but conditions are worse than the US [United States] for venture capital funding.”
Traditionally, European researchers have also been slower to commercialize their work than scientists in the United States. “University research in Germany is to some extent more fundamental, while in the US it is more application-driven,” says Schierle-Arndt. By encouraging closer collaboration through funding streams like this latest one, the German government hopes to change that.
“I hope that it will also strengthen material science at universities in general,” says Claudia Felser from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden. She observes that technical universities are the ones that tend to have materials science departments in Germany, but that there is much to be gained from the work of physicists and chemists, too. “A truly interdiscipli-nary approach will help to close the gap between classical materials science and modern materials science—in areas such as nanoscience, materials for modern electronics, and quantum materials—which will play a role in the future,” she says.
The German government has been actively supporting materials science and engineering since the 1970s. “They have been quite successful over the years, but this is hard to measure,” says Oliver Kraft from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the 2015 President of the Materials Research Society. “Overall, the German economy is doing well based on mechanical, chemical, and electrical engineering, all being supported by progress in materials. So, I would state that the long-term effort has really helped to establish materials science and engineering as a key technology in Germany.”
