About us

Our passion is to implement materials and methods in industrial processes. Our interdisciplinary team consists of engineers, materials scientists and chemists who contribute their extensive and in-depth experience to teaching and to joint innovation projects with our industrial partners.

Vision: The IMPE is widely respected and highly regarded throughout Switzerland for its high-quality education. It is the leading research and development partner for innovative and application-oriented materials and process engineering technologies.

Mission: We emphasize a profound, high-quality and practice-oriented education of students in order to pave their way to a self-reliant professional life. Our application and implementation-oriented research and development creates solutions to relevant and current challenges of the society. The interdisciplinarity and the excellent infrastructure of the Institute of Materials and Process Engineering convince our partners, who generate significant added values through the cooperation with the IMPE.

Events at the IMPE

• Winterthurer Oberflächentag WOT
• Winterthurer Klebstofftagung
• Swiss Tribology Symposium

Teaching & Continuing Education

The IMPE Institute of Materials and Process Engineering is involved in various degree programmes and continuing education courses with a broad range of topics and a large number of courses. The specific expertise of the teaching staff ensures up-to-date and future-oriented teaching of the state of the art in technology and science. Special focus is placed on linking theoretical content with extensive practical exercises and application examples.

Research & Development

Our project partners are accompanied in close cooperation from the idea through the development to implementation in production. The forms of cooperation range from consulting to feasibility studies to national innovation projects and large European collaborative projects. The focus is always on the practice-oriented industrial implementation of research results in the form of process and product developments. The competences of the IMPE are constantly expanded and further developed by national and international cooperation.

The IMPE is organized in six laboratory groups that are well interconnected within the School of Engineering and the ZHAW and whose employees work closely together.

The activities of the approximately 50 employees in research and development are focused on the following strategic key topics:

• High Performance Materials
• Advanced Processing- and Joining Technologies
• Innovative Surface Technologies
• Sustainable Process Engineering

The IMPE is involved in the following interdisciplinary activities of the School of Engineering:

• Photovoltaics platform
• Additive Manufacturing platform

Equipment

A state-of-the-art infrastructure for testing, analysis and characterization of materials, surfaces and coatings as well as facilities and devices for process engineering are available to the IMPE and its research partners. By learning about the latest technologies and methods, students also benefit in the context of their practical training.