Press releases and news

(Lemgo / Aurich) One of Germany's largest manufacturers of wind turbines, ENERCON, has joined forces with Fraunhofer IOSB-INA in Lemgo to develop a groundbreaking innovation for wind turbine (WTG) control: The new ultra-high-speed communication system has now been successfully implemented and tested at the end of 2022 at the Staphorst wind farm in the Netherlands in a model type E-138 EP3 wind turbine with a rotor diameter of 138 meters and a rated power of 4.26 MW. The new technology improves the control of so-called feed-in converters. With the increasing number of regenerative energy sources, powerful feed-in converters play a central role. Thus, the new Fraunhofer technology is an important building block for a robust energy grid of the future. The system makes it possible to control the active and reactive power feed-in of wind turbines into the energy grid in real time and more precisely than ever before, enabling potential for greater efficiency.

Making aircraft more fuel-efficient is one of the aviation industry's most important goals. To this end, Lufthansa Technik uses AeroSHARK, a technology inspired by sharkskin, which significantly reduces frictional drag and thus emissions. To attach the coating optimally, however, it is necessary to conduct flow simulations which take the actual wing shape during flight into account. Measuring this is a challenge - and a specialty of the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB, as successful measurements flights by Lufthansa Technik have shown.

(Lemgo / Rheda-Wiedenbrück) Based on a mobile 5G campus network, the Fraunhofer Institute from Lemgo and Wireless Consulting GmbH successfully carried out the planning and commissioning of a 5G campus network at Venjakob Maschinenbau GmbH & Co KG.

The Fraunhofer Institute in Lemgo and the Department of Economics at the Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences (THOWL) have founded a new research area at the Innovation Campus in Lemgo. The focus is on the development of new business models based on added values that lie in the product and production data of primarily medium-sized companies. Data-based value chains are becoming increasingly important because more and more data is being generated in automated industrial production environments. To enable medium-sized companies in particular to generate more value from this data in the future - for example, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and via new business models - Fraunhofer and TH OWL are combining the perspective of economics with more than ten years of expertise in intelligent automation.

The digitalization of value chains is advancing very rapidly. For the automotive industry in particular, Catena-X and similar projects are creating new data ecosystems with the associated services, apps and connectors. Such data ecosystems only scale if many participants provide or use data. In this case, the focus is on SMEs as Germany's industrial backbone. To ensure that the transformation gains momentum along the entire supply chain and not just among OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, SMEs must be more closely involved. Transfer-X was especially launched for this purpose: Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action with around 8 million euros, the transfer project will create a web-based knowledge platform for easy-to-understand information and training materials - with the aim of motivating and empowering SMEs to participate in the digital transformation of value chains.

(Lemgo) The signs for manufacturing companies in the SME sector are pointing to crisis mode: sustainable resource and energy efficiency as well as ideas to combat the shortage of skilled workers are the order of the day. Here, impulses and innovations also come from science. Mona Neubaur, Minister for Economic Affairs, Industry, Climate Protection and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, was convinced during a visit to Lemgo that this transfer works excellently in East Westphalia-Lippe, for example with the SmartFactoryOWL.

* Robots should remediate contaminated sites as autonomously as possible and support the dismantling of nuclear facilities as well as the recovery of hazardous materials: This is the objective of ROBDEKON, a competence center funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

* After four years of defining detailed use cases, researching technological principles, and developing demonstrators, the focus in phase II is now on transferring the results into practice and making the center permanent.

* Therefore, ROBDEKON is looking for partners for pilot projects – i. e. companies that want to offer and/or use autonomous decontamination technology.

Robots should perform decontamination tasks as independently as possible in environments that are hostile to humans, e.g. in the remediation of contaminated sites or in the dismantling of nuclear facilities and the decontamination of power plant components – with the aim of allowing humans to stay out of the danger zone. This vision was at the beginning of ROBDEKON. Now, the first, four-year funding phase of the competence center has been completed and various systems waiting for their evaluation in the field have been developed. These systems are able to measure contamination, handle hazardous substances, or autonomously remove contaminated layers of soil.

Making production processes that are still immature quickly usable with the help of artificial intelligence: This is the goal of an alliance of researchers from KIT and Fraunhofer IOSB, which has now been granted extensive funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG) within the framework of the strategic AI funding initiative. This will help to further combine the research fields of AI and engineering in the context of industrial production and to advance the scientific activity in the newly opened Karlsruhe Research Factory.