Conferences and exhibitions

The growing importance of material innovations, environmentally friendly construction methods and CO₂-neutral production in times of global change are becoming increasingly important for the vehicle and materials industry. The WerkstoffPlus Auto symposium offers a platform for strengthening competitiveness in the automotive industry and discussing solutions through the use of technological building blocks, new ideas and bundled expertise. The event brings together experts from vehicle technology, the supplier industry and mechanical engineering to discuss these topics every February. Prof. Dr. Stephan Krinke, expert for sustainability and LCE at the Fraunhofer IST, will give a keynote speech at the conference.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024, 10:15 am

KEYNOTE: Nachhaltige Werkstoffe im Karosseriebau

Prof. Dr. Stephan Krinke

Sustainable product design is playing an increasingly important role in automotive development. The main objectives here include lightweight construction, decarbonization of the entire value chain and closing material cycles in the sense of a circular economy. This development is being driven by financial markets and sustainability ratings, which evaluate company performance on the basis of scientifically robust sustainability analyses, increasing customer requirements, legal regulations and voluntary commitments by OEMs to decarbonize their portfolio along the entire life cycle. 

This keynote will show how the life cycle engineering approach can be used to measure sustainability along the life cycle in automotive engineering, especially in the car body. Different material concepts and production technologies are analyzed with regard to sustainability and technical measures are derived in order to achieve a set ecological goal.

In the Fraunhofer lighthouse project FutureCarProduction, different construction methods (steel, aluminium, composites) and special production technologies such as giga-casting are being researched and optimized in terms of ecology and recyclability. The Life Cycle Engineering tool developed in the process helps the developer to identify hotspots and conflicting goals at an early stage and to derive technical measures to bring the overall vehicle to the ecological optimum.