Press & Media

The 30th Aachen Machine Tool Colloquium will take place on June 10 and 11, 2021, at the Eurogress Aachen. Due to the developments concerning the spread of the corona virus (SARS-CoV-2), the AWK has been postponed from 2020 to 2021 with regard to the safety and health of participants, customers and employees and will therefore not take place in the usual three-year cycle.

The safety and health of participants and employees is a top priority for the organizers of the "Aachen Polymer Optics Days" conference. Therefore, in consultation with the event's cooperation partners and following the recommendations of the Robert Koch Institute, they have decided to postpone the event until autumn: The conference is now planned for 27 and 28 October 2020. The venue and programe structure will be kept unchanged.

Due to the current developments concerning the spread of the corona virus (Covid-19), we have been intensively dealing with safety and protective precautions for the Aachen Machine Tool Colloquium AWK'20 during the past weeks. We take this topic very seriously and are in close contact with the health authorities of the city of Aachen as well as the event center, the Eurogress Aachen.

The manufacturing of products made of fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) often still involves a number of manual work steps: the position and orientation of the semi-finished fiber-reinforced materials must be aligned precisely by hand to ensure that the product has the required levels of stability and flexibility after lamination and curing. Ultimately, this is the only way of enabling the user to fully exploit the advantages of the FRP material. To support the manual deposition process, known as preforming, the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT in Aachen, Germany, has developed intuitive software for commercially available augmented reality glasses: The system specifies the correct deposition of the semi-finished materials as a virtual representation on the mold and can thus significantly improve the quality and performance of FRP production processes.