Advanced Engineering MaterialsVolume 24, Issue 6 2200648 Guest EditorialFree Access The Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing (BAM) – 150 Years of Enabling Scientific and Technological Breakthrough First published: 21 June 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/adem.202200648AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat BAM! This issue of Advanced Engineering Materials celebrates 150 years of scientific and technical research at the interface between academia, industry and politics. Rooted in 1871 at the birth of the German Empire and at that time located in simple basements and barracks, the institutional development began around mechanical metallurgy of iron and steel and represents today a diverse portfolio of fore-front research that orients itself along tomorrow's societal challenges and long-term research horizons. Many bright minds have crossed the doorsteps of BAM since 1871, but its strong foundation is without doubt the legacy of its first director, Adolf Martens, and one of his department heads, Emil Heyn, both of which are intimately connected to groundbreaking work in the area of metals research. Specifically, both Martens and Heyn developed a series of optical microscopy methods in combination with chemical etching protocols that allowed detailed microstructural studies and failure analysis – at a time when the concept of lattice defects (dislocations) and their profound effect on macroscopic properties was not yet known. What today may appear as routine, was more than hundred years ago state-of-the-art mechanical metallurgy and of critical value in the high times of industrialization. The scientific discoveries Martens and Heyn contributed with live on today as the namesake Martensite, the Heyn intercept method for grain size determination, and the Heyn Memorial Medal by the German Materials Society, first awarded to Gustav Tammann. Since then, BAM has strongly expanded its portfolio in response to the development of many new materials that we unconsciously rely on in our daily lives. Whilst today's core mission revolves around safety in chemistry, materials science, and technology, the nine research departments of BAM provide a much more refined view on the breadth of activities. Here we find departments for chemistry [analytical chemistry and reference materials (dept. 1), chemical safety engineering (dept. 2), and materials chemistry (dept. 6)] ensuring innovation and reliability around chemicals and chemical synthesis, the department for materials engineering (dept. 5) and the department for materials and the environment (dept. 4) that focus on microstructural and mesoscopic materials scales including long-term effects at the interface between materials and our environment, whereas macroscopic scales of components (dept. 9), structures (dept. 7) or containment systems (dept. 3) complete the link between atomic-scale fundamentals and application. Complemented with a department for non-destructive testing (dept. 8) and quality infrastructure (dept. S), BAM hosts the expertise and laboratory resources to tackle challenges along the full scientific value chain. Being a national laboratory – we may say Germany's NIST – under the ministry for economic affairs and climate action, much of the research activities, development of reference materials, technical services for industry, and regulative work is in the hands of permanent staff (~1000, in year 2021). This ensures the dedication and high standards needed to solve long-standing problems or to build stable key competencies. With currently 19 joint faculty appointments and ca. 130 graduate students, the institutions integration into the national university system not only provides a rich exchange of ideas and joint collaborations in national and European research consortia, but also makes BAM a committed partner in educating tomorrow's scientific and technical leaders. In addition to these strong academic ties, 50 to 60 professional trainees are part of the numerously awarded educational program the institution is proud of. A glance at the BAM webpage (www.bam.de) may lead the reader to a traditional organization chart into departments and their divisions, but throughout the past decade BAM has developed a modern cross-disciplinary research environment, where core topics (focus areas) are identified and addressed horizontally across the organizational units. Figure 1 gives an overview of the five focus areas indicated in the outer annulus, each of which hosts a number of so-called activity fields. Figure 1Open in figure viewerPowerPoint All research and technical work at BAM is organized within five focus areas indicated in the outer annulus. Within each focus area, topical sub-categories called activity fields consolidate more narrow-scoped cross-institutional efforts. It is within the latter that scientists and technical staff from the entire institution organize their work, currently producing annually 500-600 publications, more than 80 patents, and overseeing an excess of 100 certified reference materials. With increasing success and the ability to provide technical services to the community and stakeholders, some activity fields are elevated to the status of a center of competence, which currently is the case for additive manufacturing (AM@BAM), nanomaterials (nano@BAM), and hydrogen (H2Safety@BAM). The formation of these centers of competence is not a coincidence given the disruptive AM technology, an exploding diversity of nanomaterials, and Germany's commitment to hydrogen as a future energy source. These three centers are a manifestation of BAM's mission to establish trust in modern materials, processes, and components. Figure 2 exemplifies this interplay, essentially capturing a structure-property-process relationship driven by the goal to identify, characterize, and eventually mitigate failure mechanisms of additively manufactured components. We do this along the full scientific value chain from raw material to a final product. Figure 2Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Exemplifying one of three centers of competence at BAM. Schematic representation of a structure-property-processing interplay, according to which the new center of competence for additive manufacturing at BAM operates. Zooming further into the activities at BAM, it is obviously impossible for this editorial to give credit to all the high-quality and exciting work currently done. I will therefore limit myself to subjectively chosen recent work that symbolically stands for societally needed and noteworthy research around environmental impact, circular economy, energy sources, and new materials. In doing so, we discover work linking antimicrobials persistence to disinfectants and the current antibiotic resistance crisis,[1] new ways of how to recover resources from industrial waste,[2] innovative analytical methods to quantify polluting per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) in soil,[3] or how to efficiently make use of demolition waste of inorganic materials to develop and characterize new cementitious materials that reduce the high carbon footprint of Portland cement.[4] Intimately connected to reduced carbon dioxide emissions is the development of new energy materials and technologies, where current focus is given to battery research and material-compatibility problems when using hydrogen. For example, BAM's energy materials laboratory was recently able to synthesize novel atomically-disperse catalysts that offer strong advantages over precious metal-based electrocatalysts.[5] At the more hands-on side of the energy-related research spectrum one discovers the in-service (!) reliability assessment and ageing of novel carbon-fiber reinforced pressure vessels[6] – applied research that reduces unnecessary life-time limitations and paves the way for a safe and sustainable hydrogen economy. Without materials, there is no engineering! It is the continued development of new functional and structural materials that underlies technical innovation. This in turn requires a detailed understanding of structure-property relationships, including the ability to bottom-up structural design. Here BAM excels in the characterization and synthesis of nanomaterials, some of which is even done time-resolved and in-situ, exploiting the institution's beamline BAMline at Berlin's synchrotron BESSY II.[7] For further glimpses of exciting nanomaterials research, the reader is referred to the article collection in this special issue. These skills on nanomaterials extend all the way into structural materials and component processing, where AM is increasingly profiting from particle handling and property determination (such as size, shape, flowability[8]) to push boundaries in 3D printing. Being another excellent topical fit with Advanced Engineering Materials, more than a handful of contributions to this issue underline the institutional leadership in AM of metallic and inorganic structural materials.[9] The uncountable experimental efforts at BAM are increasingly flanked with computational materials science and design, for which BAM now hosts organizational units reflecting true multi-scale modelling that bridges from ab initio via phase-field to continuum methods. Being indispensable for a profound understanding of materials properties and therefore safe applications, computational and machine learning tools begin to play an important role at BAM in the design of materials – may this be AI-supported 3D-printing process-optimization, automated chemical synthesis, high-throughput calculations, or data-driven glass science. The advent of such data-intensive and partly autonomous approaches naturally requires new standards and protocols for data handling and documentation. Here BAM currently undergoes a transformation towards a centralized and digital research data management. As an active and leading partner in the main national research data infrastructure initiatives [German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), MaterialDigital (PMD)] and by promoting the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable), BAM supports the vision of common data standards and infrastructures in material science and engineering. Exemplified in this issue by a perspective on digital knowledge representation, the interested reader is encouraged to discover how materials science ontologies can be a cornerstone of sustainable expert-knowledge representation across disciplinary borders. The article collection in this commemorative issue does clearly not give credit to the full topical scope of BAM. Despite the ad-hoc selection of highlights, I hope that this editorial not only better contextualizes the various research papers in this issue, but also invites the readership to discover BAM. Even though we are a governmental laboratory with a one-and-a-half century long tradition, our focus is the future. Prof. Dr. Robert Maaß Department head and member of the directorate References 1N. Nordholt, O. Kanaris, S. B. I. Schmidt, F. Schreiber, Nat. Commun. 2021, 12, 6792. 2M. Smol, C. Adam, M. Preisner, J. Mater. Cycles Waste Manage. 2020, 22 682. 3F. Simon, L. Gehrenkemper, M. von der Au, P. Wittwer, P. Roesch, J. Pfeifer, A. Cossmer, B. Meermann, Chemosphere 2022, 295, 133922. 4C. Grengg, G. J. G. Gluth, F. Mittermayr, N. Ukrainczyk, M. Bertmer, A. Guilherme Buzanich, M. Radtke, A. Leis, M. Dietzel, Cem. Concr. Res. 2021, 142, 106373. 5D. Menga, J. L. Low, Y.-S. Li, I. Arčon, B. Koyutürk, F. Wagner, F. Ruiz-Zepeda, M. Gaberšček, B. Paulus, T.-P. Fellinger, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2021, 143, 18010. 6D. Munzke, E. Duffner, R. Eisermann, M. Schukar, A. Schoppa, M. Szczepaniak, J. Strohhäcker, G. Mair, Mater. Today: Proc. 2021, 34, 217. 7G. I. Lampronti, A. A. L. Michalchuk, P. P. Mazzeo, A. M. Belenguer, J. K. M. Sanders, A. Bacchi, F. Emmerling, Nat. Commun. 2021, 12, 6134. 8I. Baesso, D. Karl, A. Spitzer, A. Gurlo, J. Günster, A. Zocca, Addit. Manuf. 2021, 47, 102250. 9U. Zerbst, G. Bruno, J.-Y. Buffière, T. Wegener, T. Niendorf, T. Wu, X. Zhang, N. Kashaev, G. Meneghetti, N. Hrabe, M. Madia, T. Werner, K. Hilgenberg, M. Koukolíková, R. Procházka, J. Džugan, B. Möller, S. Beretta, A. Evans, R. Wagener, K. Schnabel, Prog. Mater. Sci. 2021, 121, 100786. Volume24, Issue6June 20222200648 FiguresReferencesRelatedInformation