German Research Foundation DFG grants CRC 1153 four more years with project funding of around 11 million euros

Modern industrial production must meet high standards if it is to be sustainable. At Leibniz University Hannover (LUH), scientists in the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1153 "Tailored Forming" have been very successfully researching new manufacturing techniques for the production of hybrid components, i.e. components made of different materials, since 2015. The aim is, for example, to reduce the costs or weight of components while maintaining or improving their performance. In this way, companies can make an important long-term contribution to conserving resources and at the same time increase their competitiveness. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has now reconfirmed the viability of the research concept and approved a third funding period.

"We are pleased that our innovative approach of taking a holistic view of manufacturing and development processes has convinced the DFG and that we can now bring our research results even closer to industrial application in a third funding period," says Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bernd-Arno Behrens, speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre.

The CRC 1153 aims to open up the potentials of hybrid solid components through tailored process chains and is developing the necessary processes for this. In contrast to existing manufacturing processes, in which the monomaterials are joined during forming or at the end of the process chain, in CRC 1153 this is already done before the forming process. In this way, components can be produced that can meet the required local requirement profiles much better.

In the second funding period, the researchers further developed the basic process steps, expanded the range of materials and increased the complexity of the investigated demonstrator components. In two transfer projects, they were also able to demonstrate the general transferability of the scientific principles to industrial manufacturing processes and applications.

In the third funding period, the researchers now want to further increase the industrial readiness level of the tailored forming technology. To this end, they are launching a new project in which the solutions developed in the individual sub-projects will be physically and digitally combined in the form of an automated process chain. In this way, the robustness of the individual as well as the overall process chain is to be increased and approaches to characterising and modelling these are to be expanded. This will create evaluation possibilities with which the economic and ecological added value can be assessed - an important requirement for being able to transfer the developed innovations into industrial practice.

The third and final funding period of Collaborative Research Centre 1153 "Process chain for the production of hybrid high-performance components by tailored forming" runs from 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2027. A total of 56 scientists from 10 institutes of Leibniz University Hannover as well as the Technical Information Library (TIB) Hannover, the Laser Zentrum Hannover (LZH) and the Institute for Integrated Production (IPH), and the Data Management in Mechanical Engineering (DMB) of the University of Paderborn are involved.

                                                                                                                                                   Published by Johanna Uhe