Until now, the most common way to dispose of green waste and sewage sludge has been to compost or incinerate it. However, using these materials to produce the valuable energy source hydrogen would make far more sense. A team of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA is working towards this very goal.

Anyone who has ever ruined a cake knows that the correct identification of visually similar substances such as sugar and salt has great significance in food preparation. However, complex compositional analyses can also provide information about the quality, ripeness or freshness of products.

Forming presses are widely used as key elements of industrial production processes. From automotive technology to refrigerators, almost every product we encounter contains formed parts. The purchasing costs of these machines can reach double-digit millions, and it takes a great deal of time to set up and adjust precisely as needed. Given such a high level of investment, buyers expect machinery of this kind to keep running efficiently for a long time without any loss in quality.

The quality of industrial production processes is ensured by a large number of sensor-based individual inspections. This generates large amounts of data. However, until now, the information from the individual sensors has generally only been looked at in isolation.

Was there life on Mars? The European Space Agency (ESA) is setting out to answer with its ExoMars mission. The mission, in which Russia is a participant, is scheduled to launch this fall, although recent political developments have raised questions as to whether this will be possible. Part of the mission is an exciting analytical system that was designed to operate in space and was created as part of the research work conducted at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF.

Artificial intelligence is regularly applied in areas such as image analysis and speech recognition. However, in the industrial production sector its potential is still scarcely used. Several Fraunhofer institutes have recently developed a solution as part of the lighthouse project “ML4P — Machine Learning for Production”, which aims to make industrial manufacturing much more efficient through the use of machine learning. The software suite is very flexible and can be easily applied in existing production processes.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS offers ready-made, platform-independent IP core modules. With IP modules, developers can quickly adopt complete functional areas in standard products such as SoCs, microcontrollers, FPGAs and ASICs.

Together with 24 German research institutions and companies, the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS is working on a quantum computer with improved error rates in the collaborative project QSolid coordinated by Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Large-scale construction projects usually involve extensive coordination. In practice, however, the way in which information is exchanged between construction stakeholders often ends up being an inconsistent multistep process. Now, a consortium project under the technical and scientific leadership of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE is working on a digital solution in the form of the Infra-Bau 4.0 platform, which establishes a network that takes in every stakeholder in an infrastructure project.

Methanol reformers convert easy-to-transport methanol into hydrogen. But conventional reformers still come with a number of drawbacks – catalyst attrition, to name but one example. An innovative methanol reformer for mobile applications from the Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems IMM is able to overcome these challenges.