Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS
High Entropy Alloys (HEA) offer a unique opportunity to develop materials tailored to the specific requirements of a particular application. The HEA approach also offers new opportunities to find alternatives to expensive, limited-availability or environmentally harmful materials. They are particularly suitable for use under difficult environmental conditions (corrosion, wear, high or low temperatures) and thus allow solutions especially in the aerospace, energy and toolmaking sectors.
Although most of the research activities are still in the area of fundamentals, researchers at Fraunhofer IWS have focused early on developing application and customer specific solutions for HEA. Reference examples are the development of new high temperature wear resistant coatings for injection molding, forming and cutting tools. Another service offering is the development of energy- and material-efficient laser-based processes for coating and additive manufacturing of these advanced materials.
Our HEA research has enabled us to build the methodology for efficient synthesis and characterization of novel materials. We use this beyond the HEA topic for the sustainable and resource-efficient development of high-performance metallic materials. A current example of this is the M-ERA.net joint project NovMat-AM.