VDMA celebrates its young engineers

The  German textile machinery industry’s Walter Reiners-Stiftung Foundation has once again presented three junior engineers with prizes totalling €10,000 for their work centred on nonwovens and textiles as the basis of composites for lightweight construction in aviation and automotive engineering.

The awards were presented during the VDMA Textile Machinery Forum at the Truetzschler Group headquarters in Mönchengladbach.

Dr Roman Rinberg of Chemnitz University of Technology received €5,000 in recognition of his development of a technology for the production of components reinforced by flax for use in car door trims, while €3,000 was awarded to Dörte Marlow of the Technical University of Dresden for her work on the simulation, dimensioning and structural testing of composite isogrid structures.

Johannes Thumm of University Suttgart/ITV Denkendorf also received €2,000 for his study on braided bike frames made from carbon fibre.

Karlheinz Liebrandt, member of the board of Walter Reiners-Stifung and co-owner of Liba Machinenfabrik GmbH in Naila presented the awards and in his address noted that university engineering courses in Germany had a dropout rate of approaching 50%.

“This is alarming,” he said. “Such high dropout rates are fatal for the national economy. In times of demographic changes we cannot afford such erosion.”

The VDMA initiative to increase the quality of university studies in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering offers concrete solutions to reduce these dropout rates and to realize the full potential of junior engineers, he added.

Pictured  (left to right) are: Dr Roman Rinberg, the VDMA’s Thomas Waldmann, Dörte Marlow, Karlheinz Liebrandt, Johannes Thumm and Stefan Kross of Oerlikon Barmag.