The innovations prize of the Germany Chapter of the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (SAMPE Deutschland e.V.) was awarded at the 23rd national SAMPE symposium at TU Kaiserslautern from 28.2. – 01.03.2018.

Dominik Boos was honored for his Master’s thesis that he conducted at the Chair of Carbon Composites (german abbreviation: LCC) on the topic of “Conception, design and experimental investigation of integral fiber composite joints for the application in shape-adaptive wing structures”. In his thesis, a production process for EPDM-prepreg which enables the production of shape-adaptive components was developed. A summary of the thesis is available here. His work on integral fiber composite joints contributed significantly to the success of the FlexMat project (Flexible Materialien und Strukturen für formvariable Komponenten in industrieller Fertigung) funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. The project was carried out at the LCC in cooperation with the Invent GmbH and the German Aerospace Center in Braunschweig (DLR).

Stephan Maidl was awarded the prize for his Master’s thesis that he conducted within the framework of an exchange programme at the Department of Aeronautics of the Imperial College London under the joint mentoring of the local Professor Paul Robinson and the LCC. In his work “Investigating the Use of Friction to Achieve Ductility in Composites”, he addressed the translation of the internal structure of the biomaterial nacre to carbon fiber reinforced plastics. Nacre consists mainly of brittle but – in the world of biomaterials – strong mineral aragonite. However, nacre itself is almost as strong as aragonite while being highly ductile. Hence, with this innovative approach, his research made a meaningful contribution to the future realization of strong and, at the same time, ductile composite materials. A summary of the thesis is available here.