Newsletter of the Fraunhofer IST

Dr. Michael Thomas was appointed Honorary Professor for the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technische Universität Braunschweig on 14 April 2021. With this appointment, the faculty honors his commitment as an adjunct professor for master's lectures in the field of surface engineering.

Everything spotless – almost without cleaning! Particularly in the sanitary area, self-cleaning ceramics and tiles or glass for shower cubicles can not only make everyday tasks much easier but also prolong the service life of the products. In cooperation with partners from industry and research the Fraunhofer IST has developed a new industrial standard for characterizing the photocatalytic activity of surfaces.

In the new Mars Rover “Perseverance”, an optical interference filter from the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films, in short Fraunhofer IST, has been installed. It assists NASA's Rover in the investigation of the dust in the planet's atmosphere - and it does so under the most extreme conditions.

At the new Wasserstoffcampus Salzgitter, three projects on the use of hydrogen are being launched simultaneously. Lower Saxony is supporting the projects with a total of 4.7 million euros from the State's structural assistance program for Salzgitter. 

In collaboration with the Institute for Surface Technology (IOT) at the TU Braunschweig the Fraunhofer IST has developed suitable measurement procedures for the assessment of differing materials and surface treatments.

In  June 2022, the balloon-borne solar observatory “Sunrise III” is scheduled to begin its journey. The aim of the mission is to investigate the magnetic fields and convective plasma flows of the lower solar atmosphere. On board are bandpass filters developed and manufactured at the Fraunhofer IST; their task is to restrict the wavelength range on the detectors to the wavelengths which are to be investigated and to block higher orders.

The coating adhesion of hard coatings is a major quality criterion for the functional reliability of a coated component. In cooperation with industrial partners, a new evaluation procedure based on machine learning has been developed at the Fraunhofer institutes IST and ITWM which enables the automation of the evaluation of the coating adhesion by the Rockwell indentation test.