Abstract:

A common approach to develop ideas for new technological products is to draw on the needs defined by market analysis and business opportunities. This approach, however, does not always lead to innovative and suistanable products. More precicely, within such a narrow frame of problem definition, engineers struggle to meet the demands of particular user contexts and to adress important social challenges such as resource efficiency, environmentally friendly mobility, and climate protection.

Against this background, a new approach for product development is pursued at the University of Paderborn, where 13 doctoral students from different discliplines, i.e. engineering, science and social sciences, collaborate on research projects and questions of lightweight design.

In the field of lightweight engineering, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research is a completely new experience, particularly the involvement of societal actors in the lightweight design by composites. Participation does not only mean to initiate the process, framing and analysing the problem but also influencing it and validating the output. The most important needs were derieved together with the societal actors and scientises. These needs form the input for the within this project developed V-Model of lightweight design by composites.

Composite parts comibine the advantages of two different materials and many technological and material related aspects have to be taken into account. In doing so, firstly the functions and properties of a product were abstracted from product development to nanoscale. All necessary technical requirements, the structure and possible materials were determined. Then the sciences become very important in order to realize completely new properties of the component. With very specific testing methods and the belonging know-how, innovative examinations of composites get possible. In a next step, the material modifications can be done and than the successive specification of these approaches follow on the other side of the V-Model. Thereby, aspects as production and joining technology has to be kept in mind in order to develop a lightweight composite part, which combine new properties with new and light materials. The results of these research process are, on the one hand lightweight products with excellent properties and on the other hand, which address the claims and requirements of society. The major challenges, which form the basis for research are the demand for access to material ressources, energy and mobility. Whereas the involvement of researchers from industry is quite common, especially societal actors and stakeholders were involved into the research and development process on lightweight products. Furthermore, these dimensions were supplemented at academic side by researches from different discliplines as engineering, physiscs, chemistry and sociology.
Acknowledgement:

Acknowledgement:
The authors thank Land North Rhine-Westfalia for supporting the NRW Fortschrittskollegs Leicht – Effizient – Mobil.

Keywords:

Lightwight Design, Composites, Interdisciplinarity, Transdisciplinarity, V-Model.