Press Releases

South Africa could play an important role in the coming years as a reliable producer of green hydrogen — including as a supplier for Germany. However, the storage and distribution of this resource currently poses challenges. This is where the recently launched Fraunhofer joint research project HySecunda comes in, which is a cooperation between nine Fraunhofer institutes and the Fraunhofer Academy. The project aims to find optimized solutions for produc-ing, storing and certifying green hydrogen. In addition, the consortium is supporting efforts to build capacity in the region and in current projects on hydrogen-based fuels for the aviation industry.

Materials are actually "silent". Although temperature, moisture, chemical influences or mechanical stress leave their mark and have an effect on their strength and service life, they can hardly tell us anything about their history of use. Knowing more about the history of such influences could therefore make a decisive contribution to product quality. However, there is still no solution for making materials talk about their history. The "SmartRust" research project now aims to change this.

The European Union wants to ban a number of critical PFAS and is promoting the development of substitute materials for PFAS in four major collaborative projects, e.g. the EU project ZeroF. In this project, the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC is working with industrial companies and research institutes to develop solutions for PFAS-free food packaging and textiles.

Millions of tons of electronic waste are produced in the EU every year. With a novel approach, the new EU project "CircEl-Paper" could sustainably improve the recycling process for electronics in the future.

Human tissue models instead of animal experiments? What is already possible for some questions still faces major hurdles for more complex contexts and applications. In a joint project of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, and the Translational Center for Regenerative Therapies at the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC, Würzburg, scientific principles and biomaterials for the standardized production of valid tissue models are to be developed.

For the future decrease of carbon footprints in electromobility, the production of traction batteries has to become “greener”. In improving the electronic conductivity of battery cathodes carbon plays a critical role and thus is essential to achieve fast charging and discharging rates. The HiQ-CARB project, funded by EIT RawMaterials under the Horizon Europe Program started in 2021 to make the supply with high-quality conductive additives more sustainable, with low carbon footprint and resource-efficient carbon materials. The results after the first half of the project leave no doubt that a switch to more sustainable manufacturing methods is possible.

Electromobility continues to gain momentum. Accelerated by high fuel prices, more and more buyers are switching to hybrid or pure electric vehicles, as shown by the latest statistics of new registrations. As the number of traction batteries increases, the question of environmentally friendly manufacturing and recycling processes is also becoming louder. One key aspect is the function-preserving recycling of lithium-ion batteries. The "RecyLIB" project launched in 2022 - funded via ERA-MIN by the European Union and national funding organizations - aims to set an example with new processes for battery electrode production, direct recycling and integrated functional material cycles.

Can virus replication really be influenced by plant extracts? Researchers at the Fraunhofer Translational Center for Regenerative Therapies at the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC and at the Institute of Virology and Immunobiology at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg have investigated this question.

This year's winners of the Ursula M. Händel Animal Welfare Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft have been determined. As the DFG has now announced, the team from the Fraunhofer Translational Center for Regenerative Therapies (TLZ-RT) and the University of Würzburg will be honored for its research into alternatives to animal testing based on cell-based tissue models, and will share the 80,000 euro prize with Dr. Michael K. Melzer from the University of Ulm.

The consortium Innovation by Creative Economy (ICE) is coordinated by the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. Today, it was selected by the Governing Board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) as a new Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) in the cultural and creative sectors. The European partnership EIT Culture & Creativity aims to support students and start-ups to generate innovative products and processes in the creative industries and for the cultural heritage sector.