DGM-Tag 2024: The award winners introduce themselves - DGM Honorary Membership - Prof. Dr. Michael Hoffmann

The German Society for Materials Science e.V. (DGM) has a special way of honoring its outstanding members - the “Honorary Membership of the German Society for Materials Science e.V.” This distinction is awarded to people who have made a special contribution to the society in material or non-material terms.

The Honorary Membership of the DGM is a tribute to outstanding services and a sign of recognition for individuals who have made a special contribution to the society and its concerns. It symbolizes the value and importance of the community that is committed to the research and further development of materials science and engineering. We are pleased to introduce our DGM Honorary Member 2024, Prof. Dr. Michael Hoffmann, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in an interview.

1. Your commitment to the DGM is remarkable. You were Chairman of the Joint Committee on Advanced Ceramics and have been involved in numerous other committees. How has this extensive involvement shaped your view of materials science and the importance of networks in research?

Materials science has always been located at the interface between the natural sciences and engineering and therefore requires a high degree of interdisciplinarity. The DGM technical committees and in particular the joint committees with other specialist societies promote this interdisciplinarity through personal contacts and informal discussions, which ultimately often form the nucleus for personal networks. These networks are irreplaceable for internationally recognized cutting-edge research, as our individual specialist knowledge is usually no longer sufficient to clarify in-depth materials science issues. We need trusting cooperation with colleagues from different disciplines. A positive and not insignificant effect of this is the significantly wider dissemination of results in the scientific community.

2. You have also successfully introduced industrial engineering students to materials science. How did you manage to get these non-specialist students interested in your field and accompany them through to their doctorates?

The industrial engineering course in Karlsruhe is extremely successful with an average number of around 600 first-year students. I was lucky enough to have the students in the first semester so that they were initially “unfamiliar” with all subjects. With many practical examples, I was able to arouse the interest of numerous students and demonstrate to them why it can be essential for a future manager to master the basics of materials science. Then there were always students within the cohort of first-year students who realized that materials science and materials engineering is “more exciting” than the typical economics subjects. Many of them went on to complete their final thesis in various parts of the Institute of Applied Materials and some even went on to do a doctorate. Unfortunately, this also leads to the conclusion that our subject area is still relatively unknown to many school leavers.

3. Your work on the energy transition, particularly on fuel cells and perovskite solar cells, has been highly acclaimed. What technological advances do you expect to see in these areas over the next five to ten years?

In the field of fuel cells, we have only dealt with small aspects of the high-temperature fuel cell (SOFC), the connection technology for the production of stacks. The SOFC has been researched and developed for many decades, but has not yet achieved a major breakthrough. However, this could change in the next few years with the entry into the hydrogen economy. The reverse process, solid oxide electrolysis (SOEC), in which hydrogen is produced with the help of electricity, will be of particular interest. In combination with the use of industrial waste heat, efficiencies in the region of 90% can be achieved. The challenge lies in upscaling the systems.

Silicon will continue to be the benchmark for solar cells. Efficiencies of 22% are already being achieved with commercial modules, which is already very close to the theoretical efficiency. The disadvantage of Si-based cells is the comparatively high energy consumption in the production of monocrystalline cells. Both perovskite solar cells and organic solar cells have much thinner absorber layers, which can be deposited using very cost-effective liquid-phase processes. However, their long-term stability is not comparable to that of Si-based cells. As a ceramist, I therefore still have hopes of discovering a stable ceramic absorber material that can be produced from inexpensive, widely available raw materials and applied via a liquid phase.

4. With a career spanning several decades and numerous awards, what do you personally consider to be the biggest changes and developments in materials science that you have witnessed?

The biggest changes over the last four decades have been in my personal areas of work. I began my scientific career with Prof. Petzow at the MPI in Stuttgart with research into structural ceramics, then I became increasingly involved with functional ceramics with a focus on ferroelectrics and ended up with ceramic solar cells. This gave rise to numerous opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly in the field of material characterization. This is also where I see the most significant developments in materials science. Regardless of the material, in the mid-1980s we could only speculate about the detailed structure of a grain boundary; today we can see and identify individual rows of atoms. Spectroscopic methods can be used to detect the smallest segregation or impurities with high spatial resolution. This also applies to the characterization of physical material properties, such as the local conductivity of an individual grain boundary. Another development that has contributed enormously to the in-depth understanding of materials is the wide range of modeling tools on different length scales as well as across scales. Ultimately, this has also opened up the race for “theoretical” material development. AI-based methods will certainly enable us to make much more progress in the near future.

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