Winners (from top left to bottom right): Dr. Frederik Cloppenburg, Philippa Böhnke, Juan Carlos Arañó Romero, Dr. Annett Schmieder, Maximilian Speiser and Harry Lucas jun. (Photo courtesy VDMA)

VDMA, Rieners Chair Dornier presents awards to engineers

Posted December 3, 2020

FRANFURT – In early December, the chairman of the Walter Reiners Foundation of the VDMA Textile Machinery Association, Peter D. Dornier, presented awards to six successful young engineers. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the award ceremony took place as a web conference for the first time.

Philippa Böhnke, ITM Dresden, and Juan Carlos Arañó Romero, ITA Aachen, were honored with creativity awards for the cleverest bachelor or project work. The prizes are endowed with 3,000 euros each.

Böhnke’s project dealt with composite implants for the repair and regeneration of bone defects. 
In his bachelor thesis, Arañó Romero developed a spinning machine able to produce yarn with material from the moon. By this, the transport effort in space travel can be minimized, because insulating material for example necessary for a moon base can be produced on the moon directly.

Harry Lucas of TU Chemnitz and Maximilian Speiser of Reutlingen University were awarded two promotion prizes in the category master thesis with prize money of 3,500 euros each. The master thesis of Lucas deals with the development of a new knitting head for jacquard knitted fabrics, enabling a large variety of colours e.g. in the production of fan scarfs. Speiser showed in his master thesis a solution for increasing energy efficiency in the nonwovens process. 

This year, two promotion prizes of the German Textile Machinery Industry in the dissertation category were awarded to Dr. Frederik Cloppenburg, ITA Aachen, and Dr. Annett Schmieder, TU Chemnitz. In his dissertation, Cloppenburg developed a model for the optimization of roller cards in the nonwovens process.

Schmieder introduced in her dissertation a damage analysis system for fiber ropes. The system detects when a rope must be replaced e.g. in transport applications.

The award ceremony 2021 is scheduled to take place in person in early May at the Techtextil trade fair in Frankfurt.

Walter Reiners Foundation

Through its Walter Reiners-Stiftung (Foundation), the VDMA Textile Machinery Association is actively involved in promoting young engineers. Every year, the foundation awards prizes for the best dissertation, diploma or master's thesis and creativity prizes for clever bachelor's and semester theses. Through financial support for university excursions to VDMA member companies and to the leading trade fair ITMA, it provides students with regular insights into practice. The Internet portal talentmaschine.de and the homepage of the Textile Machinery Association txm.vdma.org (under the heading Young Engineers) provide information on the occupational field of textile machinery, the activities of the foundation and excursion reports by students.

Source: VDMA