Traditionally, the Materials Technology Colloquium is held every autumn at the Chair of Composite Materials, headed by Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. B. Wielage, takes place. This year, the conference was organised jointly with the Institute for Design and Composite Structures. Prof. Wielage opened the event. Prof. Matthes, Prorector of Chemnitz University of Technology, delivered greetings from the university management. He was followed by Prof. Leonhardt, Chairman of INNOMAT e.V. and Prof. Steinhäuser, Chairman of the German Society for Electroplating and Surface Technology e.V. All the welcome speakers emphasised the importance of bringing the great performance potential of composite materials closer to a broad specialist audience in order to make the variety of applications more clear and to deepen knowledge about this group of materials.

The conference was mainly aimed at users from small and medium-sized enterprises, both through the technical papers and the industrial exhibition. Due to the numerous visitors from Germany and abroad, the event fully lived up to this claim. Following the lectures, which provided insight into new findings from university and industrial research, the participants made active use of the opportunity for discussion.

Each session had a specific focus (see below), which was vividly highlighted in the overview lectures by renowned experts. For example, Prof. K. U. Kainer from the GKSS in Geesthacht showed the way from the material selection of matrix and reinforcement component to manufacturing, properties and recent application examples in his lecture on the importance of metallic composites. New possibilities for the non-destructive characterisation of composites as well as novel simulation concepts for the description of material behaviour, which enable a reduction of time- and cost-intensive experiments for development and characterisation, were classified as particularly innovative.