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Researchers at BAM are demonstrating how high-performance materials can be made more durable, sustainable, and less reliant on critical raw materials. The focus is on new design strategies that place greater emphasis on stability, recyclability, and resource conservation.

In a perspective article, researchers at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) demonstrate how high-performance materials can be made more durable, safer, and more resource-efficient in the future. The goal is to reduce dependence on critical raw materials, improve recyclability, and prevent performance losses in practical applications.

Many high-performance materials used in batteries, hydrogen technologies, and wind power contain rare or geopolitically sensitive raw materials. At the same time, they degrade quickly in many applications and are difficult to recycle. The result is rising costs, dependencies, and technological bottlenecks. BAM therefore advocates for a change in strategy: materials should no longer be optimized exclusively for maximum performance, but also for stability, reusability, and raw material availability.

Thinking About Sustainable Materials from the Very Beginning

“In recent years, we’ve learned how to make materials increasingly high-performance. Now we need to make them more robust, durable, and sustainable at the same time,” says Tilmann Hickel, a materials scientist at BAM and the lead author of the paper. “A material is only truly sustainable if it functions over the long term even under real-world conditions.”

A material is truly sustainable only if it performs well over the long term under real-world conditions.

Tilmann Hickel, materials scientist at BAM

A Focus on Three Design Strategies

The focus is on three approaches: substituting critical elements with more readily available alternatives, the targeted control of material defects (“defect engineering”), and the utilization of chemical diversity (“managing diversity”). The goal is to replace critical raw materials with more readily available elements without compromising performance. At the same time, irregularities in the material structure are specifically exploited to improve properties such as stability. By combining different chemical elements, materials can be designed to be more robust and meet multiple requirements simultaneously.

Relevance for the Energy Transition And Industry

This approach is particularly relevant for applications related to the energy transition. For example, modern high-performance steels used in wind turbines can conserve resources while withstanding high mechanical stresses. At the same time, efforts are being made to improve the recyclability of such materials.

“The success of the energy transition does not depend on whether a material achieves peak performance in the lab, but rather on whether it functions reliably in practice over many years, can be repaired, and can be used despite fluctuating raw material conditions,” said Andrea Stucchi de Camargo.

Early Applications Show Promise

BAM’s perspective paper is based not only on theoretical considerations but also on concrete examples from applied research. In various material classes, it has already been possible to partially replace critical or scarce elements, maintain functionality over extended periods, and reduce trade-offs—such as between efficiency and durability. For example, chemically complex battery materials can partially replace the raw material cobalt in rechargeable batteries. In fuel cells, new proton-conducting materials exhibit stable properties even at elevated temperatures where conventional materials reach their limits. In catalysts, on the other hand, multi-component metal alloys achieve efficiency comparable to that of platinum.