Source (All Images) | AZL Aachen GmbH/Dominik Fröls
once every year, AZL Aachen GmbH (Germany), the official center for the RWTH Aachen campus’s composites-based lightweight production, offers industry insight into the institutes’s R&D capabilities in the field of lightweight construction and sustainable mobility. This year’s one-day event took place April 9, 2025, highlighting the focuses and synergies across this research landscape.
Nine AZL partner institutes opened their machine halls and research laboratories, providing interested industrial players with comprehensive insights into their current focus areas along the value chain. Among other things, the institutes presented:
- High-precision laser processes for plastics processing
- New joining processes for thermoplastic composites
- F-axis CNC machining with real-time quality management
- Large-format 3D printing
- The partners’s own tape lines and tape integration.
Design, prototyping and testing of products and solutions — such as crash-optimized vehicle structures, thermoplastic pressure vessels, digital twins for structural-mechanical monitoring as well as prototyping and recycling approaches for battery systems — were also demonstrated. According to AZL, the range of topics, key activities and infrastructure seen at the Open Day enables new technologies to be tested under real production conditions and efficiently brought to market maturity.
“The AZL Open Day is a great opportunity to discover the numerous technology centers, labs, prototyping and testing facilities that are available on the Aachen campus, that makes it unique in its kind,” says Éric Pierrejean CEO of JEC Group. “The AZL organization and teams located there are a true catalyst for new projects and development for the composites industry. They are creating the link between market analysis and technology scouting, academic research resources and business opportunities with their industrial partners.”
Apart from being there as an interested participant, Pierrejean also gave the visiting audience insight into key topics and trends in the composites industry, as seen at JEC World 2025.
As a one-stop shop for lightweight solutions, AZL offers an interface for successful cooperation between research and industry. In close coordination between scientific developments and specific customer requirements, solutions are developed in a targeted and tailor-made manner — as part of the AZL partnership, consortial projects or individual projects. In addition to the know-how of the institutes, cooperation with the AZL’s industrial partner network also enables direct access to the necessary infrastructure of components, materials, tools and machine and system parts, which can be tested, developed or newly constructed in integrated process chains on a large scale.
The next AZL Open Day will be announced in the second half of 2025.
Companies interested in gaining additional insight into the research infrastructure of the RWTH Aachen campus, or using the AZL as a center for composite-based lightweight production, can contact Philipp Fröhlig, head of industrial services at AZL (email: philipp.froehlig@azl-aachen-gmbh.de; phone: +49 241 475 735 14).
This post is courtesy of the CompositesWorld and AZL Aachen GmbH media partnership.
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