Since its foundation, Access e.V. has stood for research into the principles of solidification as part of publicly funded projects. The aim is to transfer knowledge into the development of casting processes, materials and modeling tools.

For basic and application-oriented investigations, various furnaces for tempering and defined solidification in temperature gradients are available in our own laboratory, both for low-melting organic materials and for high-temperature materials (up to 1800°C). In particular, the in-situ investigation of solidification phenomena using thermal sensors, optical methods or X-ray radiography in metallic samples is used. Close cooperation with the other business units enables the use and further development of the necessary analysis methods and simulation tools for the quantitative determination of characteristic structural parameters.

As a further important pillar, experiments under reduced gravity on parabolic flights, sounding rockets and the International Space Station ISS have been and are being carried out in mostly international projects in order to investigate solidification processes largely free of flow processes and thus generate indispensable benchmark data.

Artificial intelligence methods and mesoscopic modeling of solidification morphologies are increasingly being used as new tools. All of these approaches make it possible to better understand fundamental solidification phenomena and to transfer these findings to industrial applications.