Press releases

In a joint appointment procedure of the Leibniz Association and Saarland University, Professor Wilfried Weber was selected for a dual function: He was appointed Scientific Director of INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials on March 15. He also received a professorship for new materials at Saarland University. This continues the close cooperation between the two institutions to advance joint projects in materials science.

Whether for tablets, smartphones, cars, clothing or medical devices – touch screens, foldable screens, displays and sensors of the future must be bendable and flexible. And the printed electronics applied to them must be just as bendable and flexible to enable tapping and swiping, for example. At LOPEC, the trade fair for printed electronics, INM presents electrospinning as a promising process.

Research teams from INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken, the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research (ISC) in Würzburg, and Friedrich Alexander University (FAU) in Erlangen-Nuremberg will launch the AdRecBat project on February 1, 2023, which looks at the recycling of lithium-ion batteries not at the end of their life, but already at the time of product design. The project aims to delineate the battery components from each other so that recycling by type is possible.

The INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials says goodbye to its scientific director and chairman Prof. Eduard Arzt who retired at the end of 2022. Arzt headed the Saarbrücken-based materials research institute since October 2007 and led it to worldwide recognition. He is known nationally and internationally for his research on gecko-inspired polymer surfaces, […]

At 9:25 a.m. on Oct. 21, 2022, the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) MAPHEUS-12 research rocket lifted off from Sweden’s ESRANGE rocket base near Kiruna. It reached an altitude of 260 kilometers and then sailed back to Earth on a parachute. On board were gold nanoparticles from the INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken. In a special experimental setup, they were used to study how particles agglomerate when no gravity acts on them.

Does glue work in space? More generally, do the properties of materials change when they form from liquid precursors in zero gravity? Researchers at INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken have studied how the agglomeration of nanoparticles changes in the absence of gravity and published surprising differences in the journal Small.

Researchers at INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken, Germany, in collaboration with scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, have developed a new electrochemical process for extracting lithium ions from seawater. In ACS Energy Letters, the German-Chinese team led by Prof. Volker Presser presents the process, which on the one hand, requires little energy input and, on the other hand, ensures continuous separation of lithium.

In many processes in nature and industry, small objects form ordered layers in liquids on solid surfaces. Standard models describe the objects as spheres with homogeneous surfaces, but many particles have flattened sides – for example, if they are made of metal. Scientists at the INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken and the University of Sydney have recently shown that such polyhedral particles form completely different structures than spherical particles. The properties of the resulting materials, and potentially their recyclability, are also distinct. The results of the research cooperation have now been published in the renowned journal Advanced Materials.

Eduard Arzt, Professor of New Materials at Saarland University and Scientific Director of the INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials, was awarded the highest distinction of the TMS – The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society on the occasion of a research visit to the USA. At the invitation of the University of California in San Diego, he gave the Stanford S. and Beverly P. Penner Distinguished Lecture.