Press Releases

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.

The aim of the 5G-Industry Campus Europe is to jointly explore – together with companies and research partners – further application areas of the new mobile radio technology 5G in the production field and test them as practical as possible: The consortium, coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT on the Campus Melaten of RWTH Aachen University, is receiving funding of almost 6.2 million Euros from the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) in order to set up the regional 5G research network. The institute has now selected Ericsson as its 5G network supplier.

Fraunhofer is now picking up speed in the field of additive manufacturing in the Netherlands: Through the cooperation of the Fraunhofer Project Center at the University of Twente (FPC@UT) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT with the Dutch supplier Additive Industries B.V. based in Eindhoven, Fraunhofer is further expanding its activities in the Benelux countries. Via the Fraunhofer Project Center, Dutch industry in particular will gain completely new access to current research and development in the field of additive manufacturing (AM).

Having established a center of excellence in Aachen, the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT is now bringing together a network of companies and research institutes to create a new photonics hub in North Rhine-Westphalia. In the "Aachen Center for Optics Production", or ACOP for short, the Fraunhofer researchers are pooling their own expertise with that of the regional optical industry to jointly create a digital, networked infrastructure for optics production. Eleven companies have agreed to support the center in its work. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia is funding the collaborative venture to the tune of 2.8 million euros over an initial period of three years.

The majority of driver assistance systems and completely autonomous vehicles currently use solid-state systems, known as LIDAR systems to measure distances and detect obstacles: The abbreviation LIDAR stands for "light detection and ranging" and describes a method used to measure the environment using the reflection of emitted laser beams. The Fraunhofer Institute for Production Tech-nology IPT in Aachen, Germany, has developed a system for the automated as-sembly of solid-state LIDAR systems so that such systems can soon be made available to the automotive industry at low cost. The prototype was integrated into a basic machine manufactured by the project partner Aixemtec GmbH and put into operation together with Ibeo Automotive Systems GmbH, worldwide technology leader in LIDAR sensors.

Modern sensor technology can already collect an extensive range of data from machines and equipment. Analyzing these data can expose anomalies between planned and actual production in order to support optimization purposes. However, data storage and analysis still tend to be decentralized and involve a time-lag. The Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT in Aachen has joined forces with international partners to network industrial production wirelessly with 5G in order to test its potential for industrial environments.

The assembly of bundled optical fibers with plug connections, which are used in information and communication technology, is still difficult to automate today: Fibers with fixed polarization must be aligned with great precision in the connector, and their handling and bonding also require maximum accuracy. Together with the Dutch University of Twente and the industrial partners Aixemtec GmbH from Herzogenrath and Phix B.V. from Enschede, the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT from Aachen presents a modular system for the automated assembly of polarization-maintaining fiber arrays at the "Laser – World of Photonics" trade fair from 24 to 27 June 2019 in Munich.