Exploring the Material World

The Department of Materials at ETH Zurich undertakes key research that forms the scientific basis for new materials with improved properties. The material scientists and engineers at our Department work at the forefront of several areas of material science and engineering. They seek after new levels of understanding and control of the basic building blocks of materials: atoms, molecules, crystals, and noncrystalline arrays, as well as the controlled manipulation of material defects.

Today, the Department comprises 10 research groups, concerned with the investigation of different forms of matter, including advanced metal alloys, polymer-metal nanocomposites, complex fluids, soft-condensed biopolymers, hybrid ceramics and, of course, more traditional materials. The Department now is home to about 200 undergraduate and graduate students, 40 post-doc fellows, 40 senior scientist staff, and 40 administrative and technical staff members. Its research endeavors produce about 30 Ph.D. and 30 Master’s theses, about 350 publications in a broad range of scientific journals, and 15 patent applications per annum. In addition, the past few years have witnessed the formation of a number of spin-off companies, based on technology developed by Department members. This development reflects our concern and initiatives regarding technology transfer.

In the past decade the Department has gained an excellent reputation, as was concluded during a critical evaluation by an external committee consisting of authoritative international scientists. According to the committee the Department "has established outstanding, world-class facilities that are staffed by a highly interactive faculty … in which world-class collaborative and high-quality, high-risk innovative projects are carried out".

Success Stories

Rapid Prototyping of Ceramic Materials: All-Ceramic Dental Restorations From Laboratory to Market

The desire for metal-free or all-ceramic bridges led to a first effort at two groups of researchers at the Chair of Nonmetallic, Inorganic Materials at ETH Zurich and at the University Zurich. They started in the early 1990'ties a first collaboration with the aim to substitute metal-porcelain bridges by an "all-ceramic-teeth-bridge system" and to test the new restorations in clinical trails.

Functional Ceramic Micro Components for Microsystems Technology Nonmetallic Materials

Thin film ceramic components and layers will become an integral part of microsystems technology in the future. Colloidal dispersed oxide particles as used in classical ceramic powder processing have now been considered as building blocks for microdevices.

Nanometer-thin, Soft Polymer Cushions: A Novel Coating on Chips for the Analysis of Genes and Proteins

Now that the sequences of the human genome are known, increasing emphasis is being placed on gene expression analysis (genomics) and on the study of the structure, function and expression of proteins (proteomics). Typical biological samples (such as cell extracts, tissue samples or blood) contain a large number of different DNAs, RNAs and especially proteins often in very low concentrations. 

Simulation of Composite Materials

Composite materials bring together the individual properties of physically different phases or components with the aim of creating a material which shows new and superior properties compared to the individual components. In order to maximize the usage of this class of materials it is necessary that reliable and accurate simulation techniques are available in order to predict the behavior of short fiber composites in operation.

Semiconducting quasi 1-dimensional Metal Compounds

Realization of the often-made promise of mass-produced, low-cost "plastic electronics" based on semi-conducting organic materials requires, among other qualities, ease of processing and stability during fabrication and practical use of the final products. Our novel semi-conducting material is a quasi-one dimensional chain-structure with a backbone of linearly arranged platinum atoms.

Microstructuring of Bulk Metallic Glass by Hot Mold Quenching — Preparation of Tools for Microinjection Molding of Polymers

Injection molding of polymers including micro- and submicrometer features is a field which experienced a boom in the last decade with mass applications such as compact discs. Some current efforts aim to extend the field into microfluidics with applications such as the "labCD", a microanalytical tool with a complex system of high aspect ratio microchannels.

For more information on these success stories see: www.mat.ethz.ch/about_us/material_world