Area of research ETA

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 in order 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.

In an interdisciplinary team of currently 21 scientific staff members, the group “Energy technologies and applications in production” conducts research on 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 “Energy-optimised production machines”, “Energy-optimised supply systems”, “Energy management and monitoring”, “Simulation of energy systems” and “Artificial intelligence for energy systems”.

The energy optimisations range from individual machines to the holistic energy optimisation of the production environment. Both the efficient design of components and systems (machines, supply technology) 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.

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