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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.