Fine particles back into the raw material cycle
Within three subprojects, organic, metallic and fines that could be recycled into cement are being investigated. © FINEST
Industrial processes always produce fine-grained residues. These rarely find their way back into the industrial value chain, but are usually disposed of and represent a potential environmental risk. The FINEST project records and investigates various of these fine-grained material flows with the aim of developing new concepts to keep them in the cycle and safely dispose of remaining residues.
FINEST was successful in the Helmholtz Association's sustainability competition and will now receive 5 million euros in funding.
The project is coordinated by the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology (HIF) at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and involves teams at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the TU Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF) and the University of Greifswald.
The HZB is participating in FINEST in a project on the degradation of microplastics. "Together with the UFZ, we want to investigate how microplastic particles can be degraded, for example by bacterial enzymes that we improve on a structure basis. In addition, we also want to work with the HZDR to develop new detection methods for micro- and nanoplastics," says Dr. Gert Weber, who conducts research in the Macromolecular Crystallography Group at the HZB.
Starting in July 2022, the researchers from the six participating institutions will work in the five-year project on ultra-fine materials of anthropogenic origin such as microplastics, mineral additives (additives) or metals, for which there are currently hardly any recycling options. Innovative processes are to be used to increase the currently still very low recycling rates of these fine particulate materials and to deposit the remaining residues harmlessly in order to advance a sustainable circular economy.
Read the full text of the press release at the website of HZDR
- Only at BESSY II worldwide: IR nanoscopy at very long THz wavelengthsThe team at the IRIS beamline at BESSY II has created a new experimental option: They achieved infrared nanoscopy with a spatial resolution of around 50 nm at very long THz wavelengths. This was possible thanks to a temporal pattern of light pulses known as the low-alpha operating mode at BESSY II. Worldwide, BESSY II is the only synchrotron light source at which users could perform nanoscopy in a single setup from 25 to 4000 cm-1, a unique opportunity for ultra-broadband characterisation of complex materials at the nanoscale in both the life sciences and materials sciences.
- Ultrafast demagnetisation - Thinner iron, stronger effectThe thinner an iron film, the more easily it can be demagnetised by a laser pulse. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and other partners, have discovered why: the key lies in the magnetic order at the material's interfaces. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new technologies for magnetic data storage. The results have been published in the scientific journal Advanced Science.
- Blind spot for the arrangement of atomsArtificial intelligence is increasingly being used to predict the properties of new materials. A research team from Jena and the United States now shows in a study published in the journal Nature Computational Science that when language models are used for this purpose, they reliably identify which types of atoms a material contains. However, they make insufficient use of information about how those atoms are arranged in space. Neither larger models nor additional training data resolve this weakness. For material properties that depend strongly on structure, AI models specifically designed to process spatial relationships are therefore the more reliable choice. (DOI: 10.1038/s43588-026-01045-2)