Energy, Mobility, Transport and Environment

We develop carbon-neutral and environmentally friendly energy, mobility and transport systems of the future. We focus on renewables, storage technologies, smart industrial energy systems and sectors, human piloted, automatic and autonomous transport of persons and goods on road, off road, rail, in the sea and in the air. Within this context we develop, design, modelling, optimization, and testing of both, on system and component level.

Topics: Defosilisation / Renewables, waste heat and heat trans-formation / Heat and power storages / Fluid machinery / Building systems / Energy sector coupling / Smart industrial energy systems / Digital twins for energy and mobility systems / Energy efficiency / Thermal and electrochemical propulsion systems / Lightweight design / Zero impact emissions / Drivetrain technologies / Vehicle dynamics, control and safety / Autonomous navigation and driving / Aircraft design / Predictive operation, maintenance and big-data processing / Advanced control theory.

Materials, Production and Management

Advanced high-performance materials and production technologies are an inevitable foundation of current and future product and process innovation. In this research focus, we deal with the corresponding materials research, production techniques, production systems and their management at the operational, the business and the enterprise level.

Topics: Materials Process Design / Materials Characterization / Hierarchical Materials / Surface Engineering / Manufacturing Processes / Machine Tools / Robotics and Automation / Autonomous Systems / Production Systems Design and Optimization / Logistics and Maintenance / Industrial Engineering and Financial Management / Quality and Risk Management.

Human-centred Design, Health and Medicine

We aim to develop technologies enabling healthy living, working and ageing. Human-centred design puts individual and societal well-being into the focus, acknowledging diversity and human dignity. We apply our competences in areas of sustainable product development, ethically aligned technology & work design, as well as science & engineering in health & medicine.

Topics: precision and personalized medicine / eco-design / ethically aligned design / technology assessment / gender, diversity and inclusion / democratizing technology / innovation systems / new world of work / human robot interaction / musculoskeletal biomechanics / cardio-vascular biomechanics / respiratory biomechanics / additive manufacturing of biomaterials / biomaterial design & characterisation / biofabrication /  assistive devices hard-tissue implants.

Digital engineering innovation

Within this focus area, we employ our engineering expertise combined with interdisciplinary research in computer science, mathematics, physics and others to open up new frontiers in application-oriented engineering design and decision making. Our computer-based assistance systems, digital twins and shadows empower digital transformation and technology innovation.

Topics: Artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data in engineering / Digital assistance systems / Digital material, product and process design / Fundamentals in robotics / In-silico medicine and digital healthcare / Model hierarchies and model order reduction / Model selection and model fidelity / Multi-physics simulation  / Non-Linear Dynamical Systems, Stability, and Chaos / Problemtailored numerical methods / Technology and innovation management / Turbulent, reactive, and multi-phase flows / High-performance computing in engineering / Knowledge representation and visualization / Cloud and distributed computing in engineering.