During a preparatory seminar held the week before the competition, participants were able to hone their theoretical and practical skills in the chemistry lab at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and at the Kerschensteiner Kolleg in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Things then got serious in Zurich: Two five-hour exams were administered at ETH Zurich—one theoretical and one practical. In these exams, participants had to tackle challenging problems in inorganic, physical, and organic chemistry. In the lab, their tasks included determining the iron content of an unknown ore sample and successfully carrying out two organic syntheses.

The German team finished in 17th place overall, a result to which Niklas Küstner contributed with his bronze medal.

Calculating all possible light rays in real time—as is done, for example, in video games or virtual reality—requires enormous computing and memory resources. It is therefore necessary to develop faster and more efficient algorithms for ray tracing.

In his “Jugend forscht” project,“Real-Time Ray Tracing on Adaptively-Sampled Distance Fields,” Jonathan Hähne developed suchan algorithm. Compared to conventional software, the prototype of real-time ray tracing software he developed is, among other things, better able to accurately render curved surfaces.

In 2020, the national “Jugend forscht” competition unfortunately had to be canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, Jonathan Hähne, a plus-MINT student from Louisenlund, was not able to compete with his project in the national “Jugend forscht” competition until 2021. Since he was already a student at the Technical University of Munich at that time, he competed on behalf of the state of Bavaria.

This is what happened to Marit Kock and Mariella Benkenstein, who not only won the special Energy Transition 2021 prize with their research project "Environmentally friendly storage using redox flow technology", but were also motivated to put their idea into practice and set up their own company.

Mariella Benkenstein and Marit Kock came across the so-called redox flow battery in their search for a low-cost, high-capacity electricity storage system. It consists of two tanks with liquid electrolytes that are separated by a semi-permeable membrane. Today, vanadium solutions are usually used for redox flow batteries. The young researchers were looking for an environmentally friendly and inexpensive alternative and built a battery based on dissolved carbon dioxide in water. This process proved to be usable in principle. In practice, however, it was difficult to implement because the electrolyte has to be under constant pressure. Only then does the carbon dioxide remain dissolved. Since then, the two have continued their research and are working on a commercial implementation of their idea.