Engineering
Cooperation and International News
In February 2014, a ceremony at Villa Horion in the presence of Christina Rau, the wife of the late former NRW Minister President and subsequent Federal President, was held to mark the founding of the Johannes-Rau-Forschungsgemeinschaft. The research association is the new umbrella organisation for 13 non-university research institutions with more than 1000 employees in North Rhine-Westphalia. The UDE is represented in the newly established association by four affiliated institutes. The President of the Founding Board is Prof. Dieter Bathen, the head of Thermal Process Engineering and Director of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Technology (IUTA).
National and international conferences at the UDE were organised by several members of the Department: The Chair of Business Administration and Controlling hosted the first symposium of the Jackstädt-Stiftung, attended by 17 business administration professors in Duisburg. Mechatronics organised the second “International Conference on Cable-Driven Parallel Robots (CableCon 2014)”, at which some 35 wire-robotics experts from 15 countries presented their research findings over two days at the UDE. The VDI Wissensforum and the Chairs of Thermodynamics and Environmental Engineering and Plant Design organised the “26th Deutscher Flammentag” (German Flame Day) in 2013, which attracted over 200 participants from industry and higher education.
In 2014, Water Technology established an institute partnership on the theme of “Fundamental Research on the Removal of Organic Pollutants in Water Treatment by Special Hybrid Processes” with University of Novi Sad in Serbia. The partnership is supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The affiliated institute IWW has been coordinating the EU “DESSIN” research project since 2014, which deals with innovative approaches to eliminating water shortages and improving the water quality in European conurbations.
In 2013, Prof. Lallan Mishra from the Department of Chemistry of BHU Varanasi, India, received support from the DFG to join the Thermodynamics group as a visiting researcher. Work on ruthenium complexes as precursors in chemical vapour deposition in the group resulted in a joint publication.
Researchers from Environmental Process Engineering and Plant Design are working on a number of international collaborative projects. In COALEEP, innovative concepts for firing system design are being developed for efficient and flexible use of brown coal. The project partners are Mitsubishi-Hitachi Power Systems and in Greece the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), the Chemical Process and Energy Resources Institute (CPERI) and SOLERGON S.A. The “iNoPa – Cogeneration Power-Plant” project involves thermodynamic and economic evaluation of concepts to integrate solar heat in bagasse biomass power plants. The partners here are Brazilian universities in Florianópolis and Sao Paulo and two Brazilian state research institutes.