Leibniz Institute for Materials Engineering - IWT, Bremen
As the first benefactor of the Leibniz Institute for Materials Engineering - IWT, Bremen, the AWT supports an internationally renowned research institute with high-quality equipment.
Since 1950, research has been conducted at the IWT on highly stressed metallic materials.
At the IWT, expertise in materials technology, process engineering and manufacturing technology is combined in one institute.
This interdisciplinary cooperation enables the scientists to map and research overarching issues with high practical relevance of highly stressed components along the entire process chain.
Various special research areas, industrial joint research projects, interdisciplinary projects, cooperation with other research institutes (national and international), service sector.
New director of the Materials Engineering department
Since June 1, 2021, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Rainer Fechte-Heinen has been Head of the Materials Engineering Department and Managing Director of Leibniz-IWT Bremen and Head of the Official Materials Testing Institute of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (MPA Bremen). He thus succeeded Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hans-Werner Zoch.
Prof. Dr. Fechte-Heinen is 42 years old, married and studied mechanical engineering with a focus on materials simulation and mechanics in Bochum, Seville and Berkeley from 2000 to 2004. In his doctorate, which he completed in 2007 at the Ruhr University in Bochum, he worked on the simulation of martensitic phase transformations in shape memory alloys. Subsequently, he worked part-time on his habilitation, continuously gave his own lectures since 2009, and was appointed Privatdozent at Ruhr-University Bochum in 2014 and Honorary Professor for Mechanics of Materials of Phase Transformations in Solids in 2018.
From 2007 to 2020 Prof. Dr. Fechte-Heinen was employed at thyssenkrupp Steel Europe AG in various functions in the Materials Competence Center and in research and development. Among other things he was responsible for optimization projects of existing steels and their production systems, the development of innovative materials, idea generation and validation, and IP management. Before joining Leibniz-IWT, he was head of Product Development with focus on hardened, tempered and multiphase hot rolled steel products.
Unique in Germany, the IWT combines the three specialist disciplines of materials engineering, process engineering and manufacturing engineering as equally departments under one roof. Technological problems of metal processing companies can be solved without time-consuming coordination processes on an interdisciplinary level. Located on the campus of the University of Bremen, the know-how base of the IWT is additionally strengthened by the close integration with the Department of Production Engineering at the University of Bremen.