MERU – Metallurgy

Metallurgy has been and is still a very important discipline for most companies in the watch, machine tool and electronic sectors. Although it is viewed sometimes as an old and very mature field, such is not the case in reality. In fact, a very large percentage of Swiss materials engineers are hired in this field at the end of their master or PhD studies. Further proof of the vitality of metallurgy is found in the close connections between industry and academic partners via CTI, EU and bilateral industry-funded research projects.

Switzerland has attained a strong position of leadership in metallurgy but over the past 5 years this position has been eroded for several reasons: re-orientation of chairs after the retirement of professors, emphasis of new materials fields such as bio- and nano-technologies and a decrease of financial support. Nonetheless, metallurgy remains industrially one of the most important fields in the materials domain, and many interesting problems remain to be solved (e.g. rolling Al down to 10 m-thick foil, production of steel beverage cans with 0.17 m thick wall, welding of aluminium sheets, single-crystal nickel-base superalloy turbine blades, combination of dissimilar materials, Pb-free soldering, Ni-free stainless steel, etc).

The Metallurgical Education and Research Unit fosters pre-competitive research projects in leading-edge metallurgy. Each of the projects is a collaborative effort between Swiss industrial partners and the research institutes of the ETH domain. The projects are focused in two thematic areas:

(1) Neo-metallurgy: New alloys, new processes and new investigation techniques
(2) Multi-scale, multi-phenomena modelling of metallic systems

Through these pre-competitive research projects, increased collaboration between industry and academics, and educational initiatives, MERU aims to revive metallurgy research in Switzerland and promote our high level of achievement in this field.