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A consortium comprising Fraunhofer IWS, the TUD Dresden University of Technology, ArianeGroup, and the Warsaw Institute of Aviation has achieved a significant breakthrough in aerospace engineering: the first successful hot gas test of a 3D-printed aerospike engine powered by a combination of sustainable hydrogen peroxide and kerosene propellant. This project was conducted under the ESA-funded ASPIRER initiative. The test results hold the potential to enhance the efficiency of space missions significantly.

Methods such as computer tomography and ultrasound provide a non-destructive view into the interior of a workpiece. However, they provide too little information about the structure and properties of the material. Serial sectioning is a different matter. Although the sample part is gradually removed, the method offers clear advantages over non-destructive methods. Dr. Jörg Bretschneider explains the potential of serial sectioning, including with regard to automation using robots.

Finding solutions to potential resource bottlenecks requires sustainable material design. New material compositions enable more environmentally friendly ship propulsion systems, more economical aircraft engines or even lighter electric vehicles. At Fraunhofer IWS, the Competence Field Materials Characterization and Testing led by Prof. Martina Zimmermann is developing the “recipes“ for tomorrow‘s materials. The unique feature: Here, new alloys can be generated and analyzed directly using additive manufacturing methods. The 3D printers at the institute allow the newly developed recipes to be tested long before they are used in industry.

Powerful mobile fuel cells can help to reduce the environmental impact of heavy duty transportation in Germany and worldwide in the future. 19 Fraunhofer Institutes from nine German states have therefore joined forces to form the development alliance “H2GO – National Fuel Cell Production Action Plan”. They aim to jointly develop industrial technologies to produce fuel cells and efficiently transfer new processes to industry. The focus is on fuel cells for road-based heavy duty vehicles. The Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport Affairs is funding H2GO with around 80 million euros from the “Future Fund for the Automotive Industry“ until the end of 2025. The Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS is also part of this consortium. Dr. Teja Roch oversees the “HP2BPP” sub-project at Fraunhofer IWS, located in Dresden and Dortmund. In this interview, he explains the innovative contributions.

A dark chapter in human history unfolded in Chornobyl on April 26, 1986, when Block 4 of the nuclear power plant exploded, resulting in a meltdown. This tragic incident transformed the immediate surroundings into an uninhabitable landscape and impacted the environment and the health of the population in the long term. Decades later, humanity faces the urgent challenge of dismantling the damaged power plant. Researchers at Fraunhofer IWS in Dresden, who are tackling this complex task, recognize this necessity. Scientists of the Cutting and Joining Technology Field members work on a laser-based, remote-oper-ated dismantling process for contaminated material mixtures. In this interview, Dr. Andreas Wetzig and Dr. Jan Hauptmann provide insights into the background to this ambitious task.

The laser expert Prof. Andrés Lasagni was elected as a new member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), during the last General Assembly.

Digitalization is changing the job profile of materials testers. One critical criterion is to provide teams with sufficient training on new digital lab books. This shall secure expertise for companies and institutes in the long term. The Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS in Dresden and its partners have gained these and other insights from the now-completed project “DiWan: Digital change in materials testing.” The Dresden institutes incorporate those into their further activities in the digital transformation context of materials science and engineering.

The European Union has set itself the goal of better recording and further reducing methane emissions in the agricultural, waste, and energy sectors. In this context, the Fraunhofer Application Center for Optical Metrology and Surface Technologies AZOM, “Micro-Hybrid Electronic” and “fiberware” launched a research project for waveguide-based trace gas analysis of methane under the coordination of “DBI – Gas- und Umwelttechnik”. The aim is to develop a mobile compact handheld device that can determine methane emissions with a precision not previously possible. The project is being funded over three years as part of the BMBF's “KMU-innovativ: Ressourceneffizienz und Klimaschutz” (SME Innovative: Resource Efficiency and Climate Protection) funding measure (HLSG-CH4 for short).

Germany has rediscovered the battery as a key technology – especially since realizing that many major German automotive manufacturers will take phase out internal combustion engines and focus to a large extent on battery-electric powered concepts. A race to catch up has been underway ever since in order to make up for the recently obvious capacity and technology lead of Asian and U.S. corporations.

If a shift away from fossil fuels and toward environmentally friendly alternatives is to succeed, Europe needs to boost hydrogen technologies. Ecologically produced “green“ hydrogen qualifies as an emission-free and quickly refuelable energy carrier, but is also needed as a basic material in the chemical industry and many other branches of industry.

Components subject to heavy loads in aviation, such as compressors, are usually provided with wear-resistant coatings. This is intended to enable them to withstand the adverse requirements of their use over the long term. Typically, the Arc-PVD process is used for such protective coatings, in which a starting material, usually a nitride hard material, is vaporized in a high vacuum by means of an electric arc and applied to the component to be coated.

In 2021, scientists Dr. Tim Kunze, Dr. Sabri Alamri and Benjamin Krupop spun off from Fraunhofer IWS as ”Fusion Bionic”. Together with economist Laura Kunze the young start-up has mastered the first challenges and hurdles. In this interview, Dr. Tim Kunze, CEO of Fusion Bionic, as well as Prof. Christoph Leyens, Executive Director, and Dr. Christoph Zwahr, Group Leader at Fraunhofer IWS, look back on the early days and venture an outlook on the future cooperation.

It is an ambitious project: The European Union is aiming to be climate-neutral by 2050. Achieving this goal is essential to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees and CO₂ emissions in Europe must be therefore drastically reduced. ”Green manufacturing” will play an increasingly important role for companies and thus also for Fraunhofer IWS customers. At the institute, a new project focuses on the possibilities of CO₂ balancing of in-house developed processes.

Trees from Lusatia could support the circular economy and offer solutions for several challenges of the energy transition. Robinia is considered an extremely strong and weather-resistant wood that could replace conventional materials in the construction industry. The ROBINIA project strives for its approval as glued laminated timber. The German Federal Agency for Leap Innovations (SPRIN-D) is funding the project conducted by Lausitz Energie Bergbau (LEAG), STRAB Ingenieurholzbau and Fraunhofer. Dr. Dirk Berthold from Fraunhofer WKI and Dr. Jens Standfuß from Fraunhofer IWS provide some insights in this interview.

Environmentally friendly laser processing is becoming increasingly popular in industry as a means of hardening turbine blades, tools, engine components and other steel components in an energy-saving and stress-resistant manner: Compared to furnace hardening, laser hardening reduces energy consumption by up to more than 90 percent, depending on the component.

“Direct laser interference patterning“ (DLIP) can be used to add new functionalities to the surfaces of conductor films in batteries: The interference patterns can increase the reaction area and improve the adhesion of the metal foils. Thereby, more possibilities open up for battery manufacturers to increase the lifetime and capacity of their energy storage devices and, at the same time, the range of electric cars.

The General Assembly of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) elected five new members to the Senate on June 29, 2022 in Freiburg im Breisgau. Prof. Martina Zimmermann is one of them. The head of the Chair of Mechanics of Materials and Failure Analysis at the TU Dresden also holds the position of Competence Field Manager for Materials Characterization and Testing at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS.

Together with partners from research and industry, Fraunhofer IWS contibutes to designing the “Digital Transformation in Materials Testing“ (project DiWan). This will result in a virtual expert system supporting materials testers in their work in the future. DiWan combines the latest findings from scientific papers and the standards in materials testing with practical expert knowledge. The digital assistant will provide this accumulated expertise to its human colleagues – thus taking work in materials testing and metallography laboratories to a new level.

Failures in industrial production processes result in costs. It is therefore all the more important to completely monitor these processes. Such an approach allows for early detection of changes in the processes or the manufactured components. At Fraunhofer IWS researchers are developing novel concepts for a high-performance process monitoring. They use artificial intelligence (AI) to access relevant process information, analyze it in real time and use it for quality assurance.

A team of interdisciplinary researchers led by Dr. Benjamin Schumm from the Chemical Coating Technology group has developed “DRYtraec^®“ to produce battery electrodes in a more environmentally friendly way, at lower cost and with less energy input than before. This new dry coating process has the potential to revolutionize the production of electrodes for electric car batteries and similar energy storage devices.

Fraunhofer IWS is working on a new evolutionary stage of reactive joining. In future, reactive multilayer systems (RMS) will join sensors and other components in the field of microsystems engineering as direct coating on wafers and components or as thin films in a particularly gentle and environmentally friendly way - using less energy and yet much faster than the joining technologies used so far.

Advanced thermal spraying, welding and additive manufacturing technologies are set to aid the breakthrough a highly fuel-efficient alternative rocket engine for profitable small satellite missions. The technology in question is an aerospike engine. Such engines could reduce fuel consumption by one-third for many rocket launches, thus improving the environmental and financial costs of space travel.

Functionalized fiber-reinforced plastic composites are to replace metals – that is the goal of the team headed by Manuel Reif. The researcher from the Thermal Spraying group has now been awarded the Oerlikon Metco Young Professionals Award for his research in lightweight construction. The scientists have developed a solution for functionalizing fiber-reinforced plastic composites so that they can also be used in applications previously dominated by metals. Using the example of an aircraft wing, they demonstrated how thermal spraying can be successfully used to apply multilayer heating systems and reduce weight at the same time.

In the course of the digital revolution, numerical simulation and calculation methods are taking on a decisive role in all product lifecycle stages. In order to develop structurally relevant products for the automotive and aerospace industries as well as for medical and energy technologies, it is necessary to have a holistic strategy with particularly close inter¬linking between virtual and real worlds.

Fuses, modules and interconnect cables are widely used in many different technical environments – applications range from inside conventional control cabinets to space. While the automation degree in fabricating various technical components is increasing, wiring remains a laborious and error-prone manual process. Researchers at Fraunhofer IWS, together with partners such as AIRBUS, are developing processes to manufacture conductive paths in a cost-efficient and safe manner.

Many people associate steel construction technology with manual welding and glaring arcs. In order to manufacture large-scale, highly stressed steel structures such as overhead cranes or wind turbine towers in line with high quality standards, exten¬sive technical expertise and efficient processes are required. High-energy, modern joining processes such as laser beam welding will revolutionize steel construction in the coming years. A research project conducted over the past 2.5 years on low-distortion and low-energy laser beam welding for thick-walled steel structures follows precisely this goal.

Already in the early stages of component development, standardized characteristic values are indispensable for the selection of materials. However, as development advances, focus shifts to application-oriented load scenarios. At Fraunhofer IWS, these scenarios can be transformed into individual test procedures by directly linking process knowledge and material understanding.

The new material class of high-entropy alloys (HEA) promises many innovations in aviation, turbine and tool construction as well as other industries. Testing the countless variations in the chemical composition of this material class would require research and development lasting thousands of years. Researchers at Fraunhofer IWS have further enhanced methods for material design that will enormously accelerate this work.

The electrification of municipal vehicles is increasing the demand for ultra-light truck bodies to compensate additional battery weight. An adapted multi-material lightweight construction based on fiber-reinforced semi-finished plastic products and aluminum structures facilitates the cost-effective production of lightweight containers in small series. In this context, the type of joining technology plays a particularly important role.

The increasing electrification of mobility also affects aviation. The battery is both a key technology and a bottleneck for all electrical flight applications. Its own weight significantly limits the range and payload of the aircraft.