Research teams in the Department of Materials Technology

Research fields

The focus of our R&D is fundamental application research regarding to following aspects

• development and improvement of methods for processing of materials
• application tailored materials and processing selection
• process and application oriented optimization of materials

Depending on the nature and extent of projects with industrial partners, cooperations can be handled as followed:

• interdisciplinary project tasks (= small projects for student groups)
• internships, bachelor thesis and master thesis
• long-term cooperation including research assistants

Numerous upper austrian companies are active in the field of plastics machine engineering, plastics tooling design, plastics processing (ifw, Greiner, Zitta, Agru, Poloplast, Kekelit, Lenzing Plastics, Engel, Borealis ...), in plastics recycling (Erema, NGR, Artec, MAS) and composites (FACC, Fill, Teufelberger, Benteler SGL).

The range of the degree program "Materials and Process Engineering" provides for the different scopes and sizes of Upper Austrian companies. The academical education includes basic skills in metal technology and plastics technology with focus on plastics processing in the bachelor program and the option of specialising in metals or plastics processing in the consecutive master program.

The FH OÖ initiated the degree program "Lightweight Construction and Composites" to cover the demands of the industry in the field of fibre-reinforced polymers and their processing.

To meet the requests of industrial interests the R&D of the FH OÖ and especially of the degree program "Materials and Process Engineering" in the range of plastics engineering focuses on following topics:

• applied injection moulding techniques, extrusion techniques and thermoforming methods including screw-, mould- and tool-design
• interactions (tribological/rheological) between polymer and metal during polymer processing
• interface filler and reinforcement materials / polymer
• plastics recycling
• rapid tooling and rapid prototyping
• functionalisation of polymers and polymer surfaces

The R&D group Plastics Processing has acquired about 6 million Euros third-party funds and has published more then 60 publications, dissertations and presetations over the last 5 years.