Frankfurt - Innovations in nonwovens technology were among the recipients of year's awards from the VDMA through its Walter Reiners-Stiftung Foundation.
The foundation, through the VDMA Textile Machinery Association, is actively involved in promoting young engineers and each year offers prizes for the best dissertation, diploma or master's thesis and creativity prizes for bachelor's and semester theses.
Among this year's winners was Maximilian Speiser of Reutlingen University, who was awarded a promotion prize in the category master thesis of €3,500 for his master thesis which presented a solution for increasing energy efficiency in the nonwovens manufacturing process.
There were also two promotion prizes from the German Textile Machinery Industry in the dissertation category, which were awarded to Dr. Frederik Cloppenburg of ITA Aachen, and Dr. Annett Schmieder from TU Chemnitz. In his dissertation Mr. Cloppenburg developed a model for the optimization of roller cards in the nonwovens process while Ms. Schmieder introduced a damage analysis system for fibre ropes. The system detects when a rope must be replaced e.g. in transport applications.
Other prizes were awarded to Philippa Böhnke, ITM Dresden, and Juan Carlos Arañó Romero, ITA Aachen, who were honoured with creativity awards for the cleverest bachelor or project work.
Ms. Böhnke’s project dealt with composite implants for the repair and regeneration of bone defects while in his bachelor thesis, Mr. Arañó Romero developed a spinning machine able to produce yarn with material from the moon. By this, the transport effort in space travel can be minimized, because insulating material for example necessary for a moon base can be produced on the moon directly.
The prizes were awarded by the chairman of the Walter Reiners Foundation of the VDMA Textile Machinery Association, Peter D. Dornier.
The next award ceremony will take place in May 2021 at the fair Techtextil in Frankfurt.
