Materials Center Leoben

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Materials Center Leoben Research
legal form GmbH
founding 1999
Seat Leoben , Austria ⊙ Coordinates: 47 ° 22 ′ 57.8 ″  N , 15 ° 5 ′ 25.7 ″  E
management Reinhold Ebner
Number of employees 150 (estimate)
sales € 16 million project volume 2012
Branch Research in the field of materials.
Website http://www.mcl.at/

The Materials Center Leoben Research GmbH (MCL) is the leading Austrian non-university and cooperative research company in the field of materials science . It is located in Leoben , in the Impulse Center for Materials  (IZW) directly at the Montan University.

history

The MCL was founded in 1999 as the materials competence center Leoben as part of the Kplus competence center program . In the founding year, 27 employees generated a project volume of € 1.37 million. By 2007, a total of around € 33 million had been turned over.

organization

Partners are:

financing

The MCL has been the supporting institution of the MPPE funding program since 2008 and thus a COMET K2 competence center .

The K2 funded project volume is around € 14 million. The funding rate is a constant 55%. Obtaining this funding requires years of lead time and a huge bureaucratic effort. For example, the application in 2011 for phase II was 800 pages long. Purely company-based services or R&D financed by other funding programs with a value of around € 2 million bring total sales to around € 16 million for 2012. In 2011, a balance sheet profit of approx. € 650,000 remained with fixed assets of € 2.2 million and personnel expenses of € 4.6 million.

In the future, however, framework conditions will arise that could have a negative impact on the competence center. The accepted overhead of the scientific partners in COMET phase II is limited to 20%, although the actual overheads are over 80%. For the scientific partners, participation in the competence centers is therefore less economically lucrative, especially since they also have to contribute 5% in kind.

Cooperations

In 2011, 65 corporate partners and 47 scientific partners of the Materials Center Leoben confirmed their continued partnership with MCL by submitting a "Letter of Commitment" . In the NonK area, i.e. for funded projects outside the COMET program , as well as for laboratory, calculation and consulting services, etc., the MCL has a customer base of around 100 companies. The order / project size ranges from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand euros for the implementation of specific investigations.

Very often, however, the cooperation, especially the smaller partners, is limited to only one project or a work package, which is why more efforts are made to integrate the partners into long-term cooperation. The MCL therefore tries - through the organization of topic-specific workshops and events - to establish itself with these partners through its services as the first address for the solution of complex questions and problems and to distinguish itself as a technology driver.

Activity and fields of work

The objective of the Materials Center Leoben is the materials science expertise of the owners and research partner application-oriented bundling and commercial companies on joint R & D in the field of materials engineering , process engineering and product development - supplemented by services in consulting, materials analysis , simulation and damage analysis - to provide so as to To sustainably strengthen Austria as a research and business location.

Research fields

Experts from the fields of metallurgy , physics, mathematics as well as foundry and mechanical engineering dealt with a wide range of topics:

In January 2014 the MCL was chosen to coordinate the Multi Sensor Platform project - an innovation project of the European Union, in which 17 partners from 6 European nations are involved. 18 million euros will be invested in this microelectronics project over the next three years , of which the EU funding will amount to 12.6 million. Ten top executives from the MCL will oversee this project. The aim is to develop extremely small sensors and integrate them into computer chips . A smartphone could then, for example, warn outdoor athletes about too high ozone levels, city dwellers about too high fine dust levels, farmers about silage gases or beach guests about too high UV exposure.

In order to be able to penetrate the entire value chain from the production of materials and components to their behavior in use, both scientifically and technologically, multidisciplinary research projects are carried out in the following seven "areas":

  • Area 1: Virtual integration of material, process and product engineering
  • Area 2: Multi-scale material design
  • Area 3: High-precision processes and manufacturing
  • Area 4: Damage - Mechanism analysis, development and modeling
  • Area 5: Tool technology
  • Area 6: Anti-fatigue design
  • Area 7: Design and reliability of functional components

Laboratories and simulation area

The MCL has the following laboratories:

In recent years, an extensive range of systems has been built up, covering the areas of metallography, microscopy , physical-chemical and thermal analysis, mechanical testing, heat treatment and tribology , e.g. B .:

The simulation area of ​​the Materials Center Leoben concentrates on finite element analyzes with non-linear elastic- (visco-) plastic material behavior under cyclic loading, on fracture mechanical analyzes, on contact simulations and on the simulation of important manufacturing processes.

R&D in the field of plastics technology is carried out at the same address, Roseggerstrasse 12 8700 Leoben, at the Polymer Competence Center Leoben .

Dissertations, master theses

The implementation of diploma / master's theses and dissertations is of great interest both to the competence center and to the industrial and scientific partners of the MCL . On the one hand, this prepares the students in the final semester for academic work in the university sector and, on the other hand, they also gain insight into industry-specific topics that qualify them for demanding positions in business.

Above all, through industry-relevant issues and the payment of doctoral theses within the framework of projects, it is possible to win a large number of doctoral and diploma students to participate in the research program. The results of the research activities since 1999 are: more than 1,000 publications and conference contributions, 90 diploma theses and 60 dissertations. In the last few years around 150 publications, lectures or books have been published each year. The quota of women in this area is approx. 20% and thus corresponds roughly to the proportion of female students at the Montanuni Leoben .

Qualification measures

In 2011 around 78 training measures were carried out for the current 150 employees. This does not include participation in workshops or congresses or compulsory lectures in the context of dissertations.

One focus was on training in project management , as professional project management is essential in the context of ever larger and more complex research projects. In addition, the MCL is increasingly cooperating with industrial sectors such as the electronics industry , in which project management is an indispensable prerequisite for economic success due to the ever faster innovation cycles.

The MCL employees also carry out qualification measures themselves. These include, among other things, practical training courses as well as lectures and exercises at universities and technical colleges as well as teaching at higher technical institutes .

Web links

Individual evidence

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  1. ↑ a b Company: Materials Center Leoben Research GmbH . Commercial register data Creditreform / firmenabc.at
  2. ↑ Annual Report 2011, page 94
  3. ↑ Integrated Research in Materials, Processing and Product Engineering (integrated material, process and product development)
  4. ↑ Funding bodies are the Austrian federal ministries BMVIT and BMWFJ represented by the Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH (FFG), and the state of Styria represented by the Styrian Economic Development Agency (SFG) . If the entire federal state share was raised by the state of Styria in COMET phase I, Tyrol will also participate in the financing in phase II .
    Annual Report 2011, page 8
  5. ↑ Annual Report 2011, page 8
  6. ↑ Annual Report 2011, pages 91,94,95,97
  7. ↑ Annual Report 2011, page 11
  8. ↑ Annual Report 2011, page 13
  9. ↑ http://www.physik.uni-kl.de/fileadmin/urbassek/teaching/AtomistischeModellierung.pdf Gerolf Ziegenhain / TU Kaiserslautern: Atomistic modeling
  10. ↑ http://www.unileoben.ac.at/content/view/3021/245/lang,de/ MCL leads Europe's microelectronics to the top of the world
  11. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated November 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Company profile, page 3 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mcl.at
  12. ↑ Annual Report 2011, page 64
  13. ↑ Directory of employees of the MCL Currently (2014) 97 employees are listed with telephone numbers.
  14. ↑ As of December 31, 2011, an average of 122 employees / full-time equivalent: 92.2 (previous year: Ø105 / FTE 79.4) were employed in the company. Annual Report 2011, page 92
  15. ↑ Annual Report 2011, page 56