The industrial development of new materials usually costs a lot of money and, above all, time. The newly established “Virtual Laboratory for Material Design of Mineral Building Materials” at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is now intended to provide a shortcut. There, researchers calculate the properties of new materials on the computer and then test them experimentally. The aim is to develop new materials with very specific properties, for example to extend the durability of mineral building materials and thus make them more usable and sustainable.

The new laboratory makes it possible to visualize chemical-mineral relationships via a digital platform and to carry out calculations at the atomic level for mineral building materials such as concrete. From this, structure-property relationships can be derived and conclusions drawn about mechanical properties. “Atoms can be exchanged ‘by hand’, so to speak, and the effects on the chemical bonds can be immediately visualized,” says Dr. Peter Thissen from the Institute for Solid Construction and Building Materials Technology (IMB) at the KIT, describing the advantages of the virtual laboratory, which is connected to the mainframe computer at the KIT Scientific Computing Center.

The visualization is followed directly by the verification of the properties of the optimized materials in experiments conducted by the Materials Testing and Research Institute (MPA) in Karlsruhe, which is based at the IMB, adds IMB director Professor Frank Dehn. Initial ideas and results for new materials are already available. These involve coatings for concrete surfaces that make supporting structures more durable and thus more sustainable.

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