Materials development and research

How can you make your material even better?
Find out – with Nordmetall.

We optimize the properties of your materials and design new materials

Special applications require special materials. Extreme environmental conditions and multiaxial loads often place severe and complex demands on materials and components.

Nordmetall and its network of partners optimize existing materials that can withstand the loads of your specific application. Or we design new materials specifically for your purposes, for example in the automotive sector, general mechanical engineering, or safety technology. We characterize the optimized or newly developed materials directly and multilaterally and compare them with references.

The benefits for you:

We optimize or develop materials for your specific application.

You accelerate your material development and shorten optimization times.

You transfer the knowledge directly to your material production.

Materials development, testing, and simulation

Take advantage of our full range of services in all fields of materials development for a variety of metallic materials. Together with our partners Matplus and Comtes FHT, we offer the following services:

Materials research services

  • Materials development
  • Materials simulation
  • Production on laboratory scale
  • Materials characterization
  • Materials processing and machining, e.g., heat treatment, forming, cutting, joining
  • Validation

Optimizing a variety of metallic materials

  • Non-alloy, low-alloy, and high-alloy steels
  • Magnesium alloys
  • Aluminum alloys
  • Nickel-based alloys
  • Cobalt-based alloys
  • Further materials on request

The interplay of high strength with high ductility in particular requires the development of new, tailor-made materials or the optimization of commercially available materials. We have many years of experience in materials optimization and development, and we use modern ICME simulation tools.

Materials development methods

  • Development of innovative metal alloys
  • Production of ultrafine-grained (UFG) materials using severe plastic deformation (ECAP)
  • Heat treatment methods

Materials development equipment

  • Various hardening furnaces (also operable with protective gas) and tempering furnaces
  • Large drying cabinet for special drying tasks
  • Rolling process with final rolling thicknesses of approx. 1 mm for simulating sheet metal production (in cooperation with a partner institute)
  • Melting, forging, rolling, rotary swaging, turning with partners

Materials development using ICME (Integrated Computational Materials Engineering)

Our objective is the development of customized materials for specific applications, combining high strength, high ductility, toughness, and excellent workability. At the same time, we strive to shorten development times and optimization loops and to create the basis for a cost-effective manufacturing process.

Benefit from our expertise and years of experience in materials development using ICME-assisted tools:

  • Materials simulation using the CalPhad method and physically based models (JMatPro)
  • Data evaluation and assessment using web-based groupware for technical cooperation (EDA system)
  • Production on laboratory scale
  • Collaboration with a network of small and medium-sized businesses to generate and share knowledge, inspiration, methodologies, and experience – with the following partners:

Materials simulation with JMatPro

We use JMatPro® software to predict the material properties of a variety of alloys. The software is based on comprehensively validated material models, which we use to calculate the following material properties and characteristics:

  • Stable and meta-stable phase equilibriums
  • Setting behavior and characteristics
  • Mechanical characteristics
  • Thermo-physical and physical characteristics
  • Phase transformations
  • Chemical characteristics

We can also use to EDA to evaluate and assess several thousand simulation results and alloys simultaneously.