Chemistry within Your Grasp: the New WACKER Showroom
Do you know how many times you have already encountered WACKER today? Why entire industries rely on our chemistry? And what (mostly) invisible – but no less fascinating – roles molecules from WACKER play?
Of course, we ourselves know that these questions are not that easy to answer. Which is why we came to the following decision: instead of simply providing wordy explanations of our work and our chemistry, in future, we will simply depict it in a way that everyone can grasp. And we’ll do so at a dedicated location: the new WACKER Showroom in Munich.
The WACKER Showroom is located in WACKER House, our new corporate headquarters in Munich's Werksviertel district. Since the official opening on June 14, 2024, guests from all over the world have been able to visit the WACKER Showroom to experience first-hand our work and its impact on various innovative fields. At the same time, the exhibits also convey an impression of our identity and our corporate values.
The WACKER showroom offers space for interaction, information and face-to-face encounters.
Brand Interaction on a New Dimension
The WACKER showroom is an area for interactive experiences, where our products, solutions and innovations are presented to visitors via clear and attractive displays. The word “experience” plays a key role here: dynamic, creative and interactive modes of presentation provide a multisensory understanding of our work.
A Multisensory Approach to Information
People acquire information in different ways. While some like to navigate through detailed texts using a touchscreen, others prefer to touch patterns, watch films or immerse themselves in digital worlds.
The WACKER Showroom addresses all these approaches in various experience zones:
- In the Innovation & Technology Area, we highlight our innovative strength and technological bandwidth with impressive special exhibits.
- In the Interactive Corner, selected specimens and experimental set-ups invite you to touch and investigate - here is where the fascination that chemistry holds becomes truly tangible.
- In the Virtual World Area, visitors can use virtual reality applications and interactive web apps to dive into our company’s history and service portfolio, and to experience them digitally.
- Our Meet & Greet Area invites you to linger and work, and offers the opportunity for personal exchanges in a pleasant atmosphere.
Focus on Future Trends: Highlights in the WACKER Showroom
The special exhibits and highlights in the WACKER Showroom provide visitors with a good overview of how our products contribute to tackling the challenges of the present and the future. The focus lies on energy, digitalization, mobility, construction and health.
Rotor blades form the backbone of wind turbines, demanding durable bonding for longevity. Our pyrogenic silica HDK® ensures stable adhesive to enable precise placement in production.
Anyone interested in the topic of energy can, for example, take a closer look at a composite hollow insulator featuring POWERSIL® silicone rubber in the WACKER Showroom. Insulators such as these are what make grid expansion for the energy transition possible in the first place – besides cable fittings for ground cables, overhead power lines and others. Right next to it awaits the rotor blade of a wind turbine – precisely bonded thanks to a powerful adhesive containing our HDK® pyrogenic silica.
If you look further, you might be surprised to see a glass box with shiny, silvery nuggets: this is hyperpure polysilicon. We at WACKER produce this substance as the global leader in terms of quantity and purity. Wafers made with our polysilicon enable the production of chips for applications in the fields of artificial intelligence, server applications, memory and autonomous driving. Our Showroom offers you the chance to explore the surface of such a microchip with the help of a magnifying glass.
Prostheses made of biocompatible ELASTOSIL® silicone elastomers increase mobility and quality of life. And how do they feel? Touch it and find out for yourself!
Our NEXIPAL® laminates are not only to be admired from afar – you can actually touch them as well. Thanks to their electroactive properties, these laminates, which comprise electrodes and ultrathin silicone films, can measure movement. They can also be made to expand and contract on demand. See for yourself: touching and pressing are expressly encouraged!
And if you are wondering how you can save resources with tile adhesives, you can definitely find the answer in our Showroom: when laying tiles, the so-called thin-bed method not only saves working time, but also up to two thirds of sand and cement. This thin-bed method is only possible with tile adhesives that are modified with high-performance binders - such as our VINNAPAS® polymer binders.
Another highlight exhibit you can literally get your hands on is our life-size model with a thigh prosthesis: Made from biocompatible ELASTOSIL® silicone elastomers, the prosthesis considerably increases mobility and quality of life. You can see for yourself how lifelike such a prosthesis looks and what level of comfort it offers in the WACKER Showroom.
Cabinet of Milestones: Please Do Touch!
Whether for the energy transition, in resource-saving construction or medical technology: in numerous innovative fields, our products contribute to tackling the challenges of today and tomorrow. The showcase in our Interactive Corner demonstrates this in the most impressive manner: the entire cabinet is full of innovations, milestones and ideas. And the special thing about it is that the exhibits on display here can be taken out - touching and feeling them is even expressly encouraged!