JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #95 - Special JEC Europe - March 2015 - 41

awards

Dr. Kai Fischer (managing director of AZL Aachen
GmbH), Dr. Michael Effing (senior advisor of AZL)
and Dr. Michael Emonts (managing director of AZL
Aachen GmbH) during a guided tour of the local
Aachen newspaper.
© Michael Jaspers, Aachener Zeitung

impressed by the knowledge generated by the
networking opportunities. Signs of trust and
quality for us are also how openly our partners
exchange on the challenges they meet in their
daily business. We support them to develop
together new production solutions, material
standards and lightweight multi-materials
and products. Working together and seeing
how our common effort has shown its fruit
is very encouraging for the next steps in this
adventure. We will give more importance to
material standardization & certification, integrated process chains and continuous series
production. We just started, with our partners
IPT and IKV, a pre-competitive industrial
project focussing on the qualification and
benchmarking of different thermoplastic tape
materials. Thus, we want to establish Aachen
as a neutral qualification centre for standardized certifications of thermoplastic tapes. To
emphasize „joining" as an important enabling
technology for the realization of cost-efficient
and high-quality multimaterial systems, AZL
of RWTH Aachen University just founded
a Joining Technology department with Prof.
Dr. Uwe Reisgen (director of the Welding
and Joining Institute of RWTH Aachen
University) and Alexander Schiebahn (chief
engineer). Further information will follow in
due course."

or support for human resource research. The
technical and strategic workshops activity is a
very important service and topic-wise based
on the outcome of the technology study undertaken with the 33 founding partners when
opening up AZL's activity in 2012. Their aim is
to gain and exchange knowledge, to create synergies, to jointly develop consortia or new concepts. Eight project-based workshops started
in 2014 and remain ongoing, including:
High-speed RTM matrices, Back-moulding
of thermoplastic preforms, Design & process
systematics, and Research landscape for
composites. Two thematic workshop projects
started in November 2014: Tape qualification
and benchmarking, and Development of new
concepts for cost- efficient double-belt presses.
They will last 12 months, and each one counts
7 industrial partners including OEMs, tape
and fibre manufacturers, press manufacturers,
chemical and steel industry players, working
together on the required results.

New partner companies
AZL now counts over 50 industrial partners.
The latest companies who joined the global
partner network are Mitsubishi, Hofmann
and Engidesk. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
is a Japanese multinational engineering,
electrical equipment and electronics company
headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. The globally
present Hofmann Innovation Group is one
of the most renowned service providers in
the field of model and tool manufacturing for
the plastics processing industry. Engidesk is a
start-up company from Aachen active in the
development and delivery of cross-systematical software for engineers. Dr. Michael Effing,
senior advisor at AZL, says, "The global AZL
partner network is extraordinary through the
variety of companies, ranging from SMEs to
global, stock exchange-listed companies, from
machine producers to OEMs, from Germany
to Mexico or China. The high quality of its
members, from industrial partners to research
institutes, guarantees top-level exchanges and
development."

A wide range of services

Integrated production technology

For its partner companies, AZL offers a
wide range of services like support for the
acquisition of public funding possibilities, joint
partner projects, marketing, public relations

Dr. Kai Fischer, managing director of AZL
Aachen GmbH and member of the executive
board of the Aachen Centre for Integrative
Lightweight Production (AZL) of RWTH,

explains, "Our offer addresses all kinds of companies active in lightweight production technology. Next to joint partner projects between
huge industrial names, especially for SMEs,
our offer to support them in public funding
opportunities can be interesting: companies
save time and money while benefitting from
the competencies of industrial partners and
research institutes. This is how large-scale
production and the benefits of integrated
production technology become possible. To
become a partner at AZL, the annual contribution is EUR 5000 for SMEs (EUR 2000 for
start-ups) for a 2-year partnership, so it is really
affordable and represents an extremely good
opportunity to meet established companies
and make projects together."
At the JEC Show in Paris and in the framework of a strategic partnership between
JEC and AZL, both partners are jointly
promoting integrated production technology. When talking about the integrated
production technology approach, we mean
a holistic consideration of lightweight design
operations, including multi-material systems,
services across branches, products and
materials, automation of lightweight production (especially regarding mass production
requirements), recycling-oriented product
development, optimization of manufacturing,
processing, machining, assembly, planning
and quality assurance, etc. For the participants
to the conference of March 12, a guided
tour to introduce them to key players from
AZL's renowned partner companies will be
organized, followed by a networking lunch
where representatives of the eight institutes
regrouped under the AZL umbrella will be
present. In the afternoon, the programme will
be completed by a conference on the latest
trends and developments, with topics like 3D
fibre spraying, variothermal consolidation and
laser processing (IKV), Smart multi-material
joint-hybrid joint made of steel and FRP
(ISF), Automated production of tailored thermoplastic composite blanks for high-volume
applications (Fraunhofer IPT) or Intrinsic
joining of incompatible fibre-reinforced
plastics by photonic technologies (AZL), to
name just a few. n

No95 March 2015 / jec

More information:
www.azl-aachen-gmbh.de

composites magazine 41

http://www.azl-aachen-gmbh.de

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #95 - Special JEC Europe - March 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #95 - Special JEC Europe - March 2015