News

At this year's CADFEM Conference 2024 in Darmstadt, 700 international representatives from science and industry met for professional exchange and networking. Keynotes and top-class user presentations with topics from everyday engineering and simulation were held in the "Darmstadtium" conference buil...

The Chair of Design Engineering congratulates Mr Sven Wirsching on successfully passing his doctoral examination to become a Dr.-Ing. on 12.04.2024. Mr Wirsching presented the contents of his dissertation entitled "Numerical optimisation of secondary, lubricated point and elliptical contacts for the...

The Chair of Design Engineering congratulates Mr Matthias Müller on passing his doctoral examination for the degree of Dr.-Ing. on 18.04.2024. Matthias Müller successfully defended his dissertation entitled "Potentials and perspectives of a ring lubrication system for the lubricant supply of rolling...

The exploratory study focusses on the design of physical products and their potential to empower users by promoting positive emotions and subjectively perceived self-efficacy. By investigating the usability and emotional appeal of one particular product - a walking aid - researchers at KTmfk and Fra...

Once again excellent teaching at KTmfk: Marcel Bartz was awarded with the Bavarian State Prize for Excellent Teaching 2023 by the Bavarian State Minister for Science and the Arts, Markus Blume, during the Day of Good Teaching at TH Nürnberg. With the prize for excellent teaching, the Bavarian State...

For this year's convention, the KTmfk – Engineering Design Institute at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg retreated to the pre-alpine lands at the "Wilder Kaiser" from March 19 to 21. The focus was on identifying and driving forward new research projects as well as the doctoral thesis. In addition to the worksh...

The ongoing development of KTmfk lectures in line with current technical challenges and the needs of students is an important focus of our work. The fact that this is once again working well is shown by the repeated award for our "Machine Elements II" course, which received excellent evaluations fro...

The latest publication of the KTmfk with the project partners from Hamburg (LaFT) and Karlsruhe (IPEK) was selected as the cover story for the March issue of the journal Applied Sciences. The publication addresses a co-simulation model consisting of a musculoskeletal human model, an exoskeleton mode...

For sampling-based tolerance-cost optimization, a high number of function evaluations is unavoidable, which can lead to long calculation times. To overcome this shortcoming, the latest KTmfk publication presents an innovative strategy that combines metaheuristic optimization and adaptive surrogate m...

Mechatronic systems have become increasingly important in recent years and have become an integral part of our lives today. They are characterised in particular by the combination of the fields of mechanics, electrical engineering and information technology. To date, the development of mechatronic s...

Marc Behringer joined the Digital Engineering department as a research assistant at the beginning of February. Prior to that, he studied in the master's program in mechatronics with a focus on design and embedded systems at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He also wrote his mas...

During this year's design project course (KoPra), the challenge for the students was to develop an autonomous biathlon vehicle that is driven with the help of a microcontroller. The students' vehicles had to complete the biathlon race autonomously, which was complicated by additional obstacles. On ...

What to do in the event of a fire? Reporting a fire and protecting everyone is, of course, an absolute priority. If everyone is safe and there is no major risk to themselves, it is possible to fight the fire independently in the initial phase. In this way, any damage caused can be limited and your o...

The use of system models in the context of model-based system engineering (MBSE) is essential for improved communication and system documentation. However, publications in recent years show that efforts are also being made to reuse these system models e.g., by converting them directly into disciplin...

The 24th International Colloquium Tribology took place from January 23 to 25 in Ostfildern. In 130 presentations and numerous plenary lectures, national and international research results on a wide range of tribology topics were presented. The KTmfk was represented by Klara Feile and Benedict Rotham...

KTmfk researchers Christian Witzgall and Sandro Wartzack, in collaboration with visiting professor Moh'd Sami Ashhab, present a novel strategy for fatigue testing of short fibre reinforced thermoplastics in the journal Materials. Using adaptive sampling and artificial neural networks (ANNs), the stu...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face the challenge of optimising their development processes through the use of data-driven methods. These methods can lead to more efficient and higher quality product development. PADDME (Process Analysis for Digital Development in Mechanical Engineering) ...

The Chair of Design Engineering congratulates Mr Martin Roth on successfully passing his doctoral examination for the degree of Dr.-Ing. on 21.12.2023. Mr Roth presented the contents of his dissertation entitled "Sampling-based Tolerance-Cost-Optimization: The Key to Optimal Tolerance Allocation". I...

The Chair of Engineering Design congratulates Michael Jüttner on successfully passing the doctoral examination for the degree of Dr.-Ing. on 21.12.2023. Mr. Jüttner presented the contents of his dissertation entitled "Bewertung von Kantenpressungen auf Basis von Simulationen mehrfach überrollter ela...

The latest KTmfk publication, authored by Christian Witzgall and Sandro Wartzack, was selected for the cover story of the December issue of the journal Applied Mechanics. The publication deals with the crash simulation of mechanically fatigued, short-fiber-reinforced thermoplastics at component leve...

The Chair of Design Engineering congratulates Fabian Dworschak on successfully passing his doctoral examination for the degree of Dr.-Ing. on 24.11.2023. Mr. Dworschak presented the contents of his dissertation entitled "Self-reinforcing learning as a contribution to the automation of adaptation des...

Unavoidable geometric variations are limited explicitly by geometrical and dimensional tolerances to ensure that technical systems fulfill their function despite manufacturing inaccuracies. However, in doing so, the requirements for the subsequent manufacturing and, thus, the costs are implicitly se...

On 29th of November this year's Munich Symposium on Lightweight Design took place at the TUM in Munich with a focus on optimization and additive manufacturing. Stephan Freitag represented the KTmfk and gave a presentation on the continuous and optimal design and layout of fiber-reinforced structures...

A new KTmfk paper deals with the fatigue damage of components made from short fibre-reinforced thermoplastics. These are damaged by repeated loading, which leads to a significant deterioration of the mechanical properties. The method presented by Witzgall and Wartzack enables a realistic simulation ...

The German chapter of the INCOSE (GfSE) hosted the “Day of Systems Engineering” from November 15 – 17, 2023 in Würzburg. Simon Schleifer represented the KTmfk and gave a presentation entitled “Potential analysis of SysML-based modelling of systems and processes in the context of tolerance management...

The kick-off of the DFG research project ZoE took place on 2nd of November in Hamburg. In cooperation with the Institute of Product Development and Mechanical Engineering Design at the Hamburg University of Technology, we have prepared the investigation of the fatigue behaviour of fibre-reinforced p...

Congratulations to Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Benjamin Schleich who completed his habilitation in the field of engineering design and virtual product development. The title of his thesis is „Automatic information processing in tolerance management in the context of industry 4.0“. The supervisors were Pro...

E-Mobility and lightweight design pose new challenges in the development of vehicle chassis, especially in terms of ensuring durability. Therefore, in collaboration with our industry partner MAN Truck & Bus SE in Munich, an approach to design real hardware test rigs in a virtual environment has ...

The ongoing optimization of the KTmfk's lectures represents an important focus of our work. The positive development of the evaluation results shows that our efforts are successful with the students. In the evaluations of the finished summer semester, this time all classes of the KTmfk were rated "v...

Marc Gadinger joined the Lightweight Design Group as a research assistant in October. He previously studied mechanical engineering at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. In his scientific work and as a student research assistant at the KTmfk, he already studied the fatigue behaviour o...