Sustainable Production

Guiding principle of the application field

Climate change, scarcity of resources and political influences on global markets pose challenges for companies in the manufacturing sector in particular. Strategies such as Green Deal and Industry 4.0 aim to equip companies for current and future challenges. The efficient use of resources and raw materials up to circular value chains, high quality at low cost, zero-downtime and low emissions are goals of sustainable production and part of the aforementioned future strategies. From our point of view, mankind can only limit the consequences of climate change if all production becomes sustainable production.

Our offer

Digital transformation opens up opportunities to make your industrial production processes sustainable and circular. Smart sensor systems provide pre-processed information for the smart factory and are easy to retrofit and have low-maintenance. The Fraunhofer IMS researches and develops in the application field "Sustainable Production" in the field of autonomous sensor systems with local information processing and wireless networking. We use the latest technologies from all areas, such as robust wireless networking with real-time properties e.g. "IO-Link wireless" or energy harvesting mechanisms for quasi maintenance-free sensor systems. Particular attention is being paid to the sensor-based implementation of machine learning methods. In this form of using artificial intelligence, the benefits of this technology can already be implemented on the power-constrained microcontrollers at the data acquisition point.

Ultimately, innovative products and solutions are created in cooperation with you, particularly in the following application areas: Industry 4.0, Predictive Maintenance, Green ICT and circular production.

Examples include smart wireless sensors for equipment condition monitoring, non-invasive solutions for Industry 4.0 retrofits, lifetime prediction of ball bearings in machine tools, material sorting solutions, resource utilization metrics, and cost-effective energy management. All these building blocks can support the industry in implementing sustainable production

In our "sustainable production" application area, we also pursue and support the sustainable development goals in the German government's Agenda 2030 and work with you to shape the production of the future.

AI-based Condition Monitoring and Retrofitting for Machine Tools

The KI-MUSIK4.0 project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant number 16ME0076.