The “Young Talents” funding program of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) gave students the opportunity to work on a forward-looking project during their summer internship at the University of Leoben.
In spring 2021, the international research project METCOMP (“Metastable Solidification of Composites: Novel Peritectic Structures and In-situ Composites”), tests were started on the International Space Station ISS with Leoben alloy samples. The solidification tests on board the ISS were successful and are now being evaluated under the direction of Dr. Johann Mogeritsch and Prof. Dr. Andreas Ludwig from the Leoben Chair of Modeling and Simulation of Metallurgical Processes. They received active support from Tabea Siebenbrunner, Dennis Maritschnik and Elias Meisenbichler.
In the course of their four-week holiday internships, which were financed by the FFG, the three students were not only able to get a taste of the world of metallurgy, but also to work directly on the research results of the METCOMP project. Thus, the internships for students at the University of Leoben are everything but ordinary!
At the Chair of Ferrous Metallurgy, Kevin Kutschi and Niklas Suppan, students of HTL Leoben, were given the chance to actively participate in the following research projects:
– Investigation of high-temperature oxidation of steels with different trace element contents (recycled steels contain higher levels of impurities from scrap) and different gas atmospheres (from natural gas combustion atmosphere to CO2-neutral hydrogen combustion).
– Creation of thermodynamic data of new steel alloys in order to be able to describe the phase transformations and solidification mathematically better and thus to increase the quality in the long term.
These FFG-funded internships allowed the students to participate in the preparation of new steel melts, sample preparation and evaluation of DSC measurements as well as digital microscopy.
This gave them a broad and interesting overview of current R&D activities.
