Faculty of Engineering

Cooperation and International Work

The large number of project partners in the department means that only a small selection of its collaborative work can be presented.

Interdisciplinary collaborations with research institutes from Hungary — ZEIK Grünbau cluster Hungary — and the BIM cluster NRW were initiated by the Chair of Construction operations and Civil Engineering and developed with cooperation partners.

Three European research projects are being continued in the Chair of Metal and Lightweight Structures. These are being funded by the EU’s Research Fund for Coal and Steel. These address the use of stainless steel in shell load-bearing structures for Biogas plants (“BiogaSS”), bolted friction connections of carbon steel, non-rusting steels (“SIROCO”) as well as the dissemination of technical expertise in the design and measurement of structures made from stainless steels. This research project involving a consortium of ten European research partners is led by the Chair. In addition to this, a DFG project is also being run in collaboration with TU Dresden.

The Chair of Static and Dynamic Surface Structures is collaborating with the University of New South Wales in Australia and the ITT Madras in India on efficient calculation models for structural and multiphysical questions. The focus of this collaboration is on the automation of discretisation and calculation techniques. These are applied in the field of damage identification in wave-based techniques, in the modelling of seismic waves in heterogeneous areas and in the coupled sound and vibration analysis of thin-walled supporting structures.

In a project supported by the BMWi, the Chair of Geotechnical Engineering is developing anchorings for innovative systems that extract energy from ocean waves. In another project, the Chair is conducting joint research with the University of Stavanger in Norway into the properties of multiphase porous media. This project specifically addresses the issue of how the low frequency part of three-dimensional seismic reflection data can be used for oil reserves exploration.