Prof. Alfred Ludwig

Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany
Prof. Ludwig studied mechanical engineering at University of Karlsruhe, specializing in materials science and microsystems technology. In 1999 he received the title "Dr.-Ing." from there. He moved to the caesar research center in Bonn, in the "Smart Materials" group. From 2002 to 2007, he was junior professor for „MEMS Materials" at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) and at the same time head of the caesar research group "Combinatorial Materials Science". From 2007 to 2012, he received a Heisenberg Professorship of the German Research Foundation. Since 2012, he is chair holder at RUB. From 2011 to 2016 he coordinated the "Materials Research Department" at RUB. He initiated the ZGH (Center for Interfacially Dominated High Performance Materials), of which he is scientific director since 2019. His research interests include high-throughput experimentation, AI and MEMS tools for materials science, nanoscale multifunctional materials and new materials for energy applications.  Since 2022 he is Director of the Research Center Future Energy Materials and Systems (RC FEMS). He is PI in a new ERC Synergy Grant project (DEMI) and spokesperson of the new CRC 1625, a large-scale collaborative project on atomic-scale understanding of compositionally complex solid solution surfaces.

Talk title: Combinatorial synthesis and high-throughput characterisation of thin film materials libraries for the accelerated discovery of materials 
Discovery of new materials is a key challenge in materials science. New materials for sustainable production/storage/conversion of energy carriers are necessary to improve existing and to enable future energy systems. Compositionally complex materials, frequently called high entropy materials, offer a vast multidimensional search space, which provides opportunities for discovering new materials. However, efficient methods for the exploration and exploitation of this search space are necessary. Here, the integration of high-throughput thin-film combinatorial materials science methods with simulation and materials informatics (1) is presented as an effective means to produce large datasets on new materials, which enables mastering of the search space. The approach combines theoretical predictions from high-throughput computations with production of large, consistent and complete experimental datasets, which are used for materials informatics. Thin-film materials libraries are fabricated by combinatorial sputter deposition and optional post-deposition treatments, followed by high-throughput characterization, and finally the organization of the acquired multi-dimensional data in adequate databases as well their effective computational analysis and visualization, e.g., of quinary systems in the form of composition-processing-structure-function diagrams, interlinking compositional data with structural and functional properties. The talk will discuss examples of combinatorial discoveries (2, 3) and the targeted development of new compositionally complex materials for electrocatalysis (4) where compositional complexity offers a new design principle (5). This includes also a new type of microscale thin film materials libraries (6). Furthermore, a new approach (7) to accelerate atomic-scale measurements for complex alloys is presented as well as applications of materials informatics to accelerate and improve the materials discovery process (8, 9).