About us
The Department of Mechanical Engineering is part of KIT's Area 3 "Mechanical and Electrical Engineering" together with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, four Helmholtz programs, and eight institutes of the large-scale research area. The department consists of more than 20 institutes with about 1,000 employees, including about 40 professors, 460 scientific employees, and 200 employees in administration and technology. In addition, there are several hundred tutors and scientific assistants.
COSMOS-H stands for: Critical heat flux On Smooth and MOdified Surfaces - High pressure and is a thermohydraulic test facility for water-steam experiments under high pressure conditions of up to 160 bar. With an installed thermal output of 1.8 megawatts and temperatures of up to 360 degrees Celsius, it offers extensive possibilities. "With COSMOS-H, we can investigate heat transfer and transient boiling phenomena under realistic conditions like in a real power plant for the first time," said Professor Daniel Banuti, Head of the Institute for Thermal Energy Technology and Safety (ITES) at KIT. The knowledge gained could help to make industrial plants and power stations safer and more efficient in the future, including nuclear reactors as well as concentrating solar power stations.
In the latest ranking by the Center for Higher Education Development (CHE), students rated their study conditions. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) received several top ratings in the eleven subject groups assessed. [...] The breadth and quality of the courses on offer are rated as very high, particularly in mechanical engineering and mechatronics. The aspect of "student mobility" in mechanical engineering achieved the highest rating within this category. For the evaluation of the facts on teaching and research with around ten categories each, the ranking divides the universities examined into three groups. KIT is in the top group in the category "Number of doctorates per professor".
In the 200th year of its existence, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is opening its doors for a big day for visitors. On Saturday, May 17, 2025, KIT's South Campus on the edge of Karlsruhe's city center will be transformed into a festival of science from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. - for viewing, participating and engaging in conversation. The program, which includes more than three hundred individual offers, is aimed at the entire family. It will be completed by the KIT Campus Day, where prospective students can find out in many different ways what studying at KIT is all about.
Prospective students are cordially invited to our information events and to our advisory stand directly at the Ehrenhof in front of Building 10.91.
With the start of the summer semester 2025, KIT is expanding its English-language study programs with three new Master's programs: "Mechatronics and Information Technology", "Electrical Engineering and Information Technology" and "Computer Science". KIT is thus further advancing its internationalization. The new Master's degree programs "Electrical Engineering and Information Technology" and "Mechatronics and Information Technology" replace the previous German-language Master's degree programs "Electrical Engineering and Information Technology" and "Mechatronics and Information Technology". The latter is the most sought-after Master's course in the field of mechatronics in Germany. "Computer Science" takes place parallel to the existing German-language Master's program "Computer Science".
In the 2025 edition of the "QS World University Rankings by Subject", which was published on Wednesday, March 12, 2025, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) achieves excellent results in its central subject areas. In the "Natural Sciences" it is ranked 36th, in the "Engineering Sciences" 53rd worldwide. In a national comparison, this puts KIT in second and third place in these subject groups.
In the field of natural sciences, KIT is among the top 50 worldwide with the single subject of materials science (25th place). [...]
The best rankings in the engineering sciences are achieved by KIT with chemical engineering (25th), mechanical engineering (45th) and petroleum engineering (19th).
An international team of researchers coordinated at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has developed mechanical metamaterials with a high elastic energy density. Thanks to highly twisted rods that deform in a spiral shape, they have a high degree of rigidity and can absorb and release large amounts of elastic energy. The researchers confirmed their initially theoretical results with simple pressure experiments. They report their findings in the journal Nature. (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08658-z)[...] "The difficulty lies in combining contradictory properties: high stiffness and large recoverable deformation with limited strength," says Prof. Peter Gumbsch from the Institute for Applied Materials (IAM).
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