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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.