Digital methods and circular production for sustainable lightweight construction

Recycled material and digitalisation can significantly reduce the environmental impact of the production cycle. The joint project "DigiPro2green" is developing methods and assistance systems to optimise the circular process chain in lightweight construction. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection is funding the project for three years with a total of around 5 million euros.

Circular production is an important driver on the road to emission-free production. It enables significantly lower primary resource requirements. By consistently reusing materials, material cycles can be closed, thus reducing the environmental impact of production. However, the increasing trend towards highly integrated, functional and multi-material components, e.g. in the mobility sector, leads to challenges in the recycling of material composites, such as low product-specific return quantities and reduced quality of recyclates. Consequently, production processes for hybrid components must be able to react resiliently to variable properties of the recycled materials. Despite their high environmental potential and suitability as a key lightweight construction technology, recycling and design for reusability have not yet been researched in depth.

The DigiPro2green joint project therefore aims to develop a web client that supports the selection of suitable materials as automatically as possible, taking into account structural integrity while simultaneously assessing the environmental impact. Furthermore, digital assistance systems are being developed to make the circular process chain for processing recyclates sustainable and to achieve a high degree of flexibility in reacting to fluctuating recyclate, process and intermediate product properties.

In the joint project, the Institute of Production and Information Technology (IPI) at Kempten University of Applied Sciences aims to expand the sustainable use of digital twins for lightweight construction. The twin platform to be developed will process plant, process and material data via largely automatic data acquisition. "In turn, this will enable assistance systems to be optimised so that the use of recycled materials in components can be sensibly increased," says sub-project manager Professor Dr Bernd Lüdemann-Ravit.

In addition, methods for the use of recycled material and process models for the design of structural components are to be developed during the funding phase in order to be able to establish lightweight construction in other industries in an environmentally friendly manner. In addition to the IPI - Institute for Production and Information Technology at Kempten University of Applied Sciences, the research consortium includes the Technical University of Braunschweig as the consortium coordinator, Fraunhofer Institutes and partners from the automotive industry, software development and materials technology.