A senior lecturer, Ariel Taub from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, tells a student, at that time, Abraham Rosen (now the late Prof. Emeritus Abraham Rosen of the Department of Materials Engineering), about his plans to develop metallurgy into a program within the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
The laboratory that Ariel Taub built included an optical microscope, a bench with instruments for corrosion testing and polishing and one furnace, which constituted the foundation for today’s Department of Materials Engineering.
Relocation to the new building and establishment of the key elements for the Institute of Metals. Ariel Taub was the founder and Israeli governments and the United States contributed to its establishment.
The Institute of Metals was formally established. The institute was divided into labs: a casting and welding laboratory, a corrosion laboratory and a metallography laboratory.
The Materials Engineering Department was established in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Six staff members joined the Department of Materials Engineering and the De Jour Building was constructed, thanks to a donation from the De Jour family.
The Center for Materials Engineering Research was constructed.
The Technion Senate passed a resolution about the Department of Material Engineering’s independence and separation from the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
The formative years began – the staff members began purchasing computers and the laboratories became computerized.
The George Sachs Center for Materials Processing Research and Structure Characterization was constructed. The center was donated and is supported by the German Minerva Foundation – the center’s role is to fund the purchasing of facilities and advanced scientific instruments to enable high standards of research on topics relating to materials processing and structure characterization. The center also enables an exchange program for young scientists, mainly Israelis and Germans. The center’s research activities encompass all disciplines of materials sciences and engineering. The three laboratories that are partially supported by the center are the electronic microscopy laboratory, the x-ray diffraction laboratory and the processes laboratory.
Materials engineering activities began in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the early 1960s. In 1980, the Materials Engineering Department was established as an independent unit at the Technion, which awarded only graduate degrees – MSc and PhD. In 1994, upon the launch of the BSc track, the department became the Department of Materials Engineering. This change led to considerable expansion of the spheres of research and instruction in the Faculty to subjects that are at the vanguard of the world’s knowledge in this field. For more than fifty years, the outstanding alumni of the Department of Materials Engineering have been contributing to the high standards of research and development and technological innovation in industry. Israel’s world-leading hi-tech industry and state-of-the-art defense industry would have been inconceivable without the critical contributions of our Faculty’s graduates.
The Faculty’s spheres of interest encompass the entire life cycle of a material – from product manufacturing and its utilization for mankind’s benefit to recycling it to safeguard our environment. All of these aspects pose enormous challenges that can be tackled using the Faculty’s accumulated theoretical knowledge and professional experience. All of these are invested in educating students to become highly skilled materials engineers with solid scientific and technological capabilities to successfully contend with the challenges of the future.
