About us

The energy transition with rising energy prices, volatile energy markets and growing environmental responsibility pose new challenges for companies in the manufacturing sector. In particular, energy and resource efficiency in production is becoming increasingly important to meet normative requirements and remain competitive. At the same time, production companies can reduce costs and support the power grid through flexible energy use.

Our vision

In an interdisciplinary team of more than 20 scientific researchers, the group “Energy technologies and applications in production” researches on vision of a climate neutral production under consideration of a variety of aspects related to the topics of energy efficiency, energy flexibility and resource efficiency in production. These general three topics are addressed in the main research areas “Strategies for Climate Neutral Production”, “Climate Neutral Production Infrastructure”, “Energy System Analysis and Optimisation of Production Machines”, “Energy Management and Monitoring”, “Energy Optimised Factory Operations” and “Cyber-Physical Systems in Climate Neutral Production”.

The research ranges from individual machines to the holistic energy optimisation of the production environment. Both the efficient design of components and systems (machines, supply technologies) and the synergetic interaction of connected systems and control engineering issues are part of the research. For this purpose, appropriate simulation models are developed on various observation levels, which are used in energy-efficient machine development, machine control and in production and factory planning. However, digital tools are not only one of the team's core competencies in simulation: valuable energy data are the foundation of all analyses and a prerequisite for the following optimisation. Their systematic collection and analysis using machine learning and artificial intelligence methods are therefore important elements of the research activities.

Structure of the research group