Industry endows professorship at the TU Dresden
One of Germany’s top research and teaching institutions for construction machinery is to continue its work - thanks to the commitment of the German construction and building materials machinery industry, which is to fund an endowed professorship for the Technical University of Dresden (TU Dresden). The university did not appoint a successor for the Chair of Construction Machines and Conveying Technology after the departure on grounds of age of Prof. em. Dr.-Ing. habil. Günter Kunze on 01.04.2015, the underlying reason being economies in the Free State of Saxony’s budget which the university was obliged to implement. This was met with disbelief in the industry, since the chair, with a third-party funding quota of 1.5 million euros annually and thirty staff is, measured by its performance indicators, one of the most successful within the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. The endowed professorship to be financed by the VDMA (German Engineering Federation) and FVB (Research Association for Construction and Building Materials Machines) now provides a viable solution. It assures the continuation of research work at the interface between the drive/propulsion systems, design, process comprehension and user friendliness of electronic-hydraulically controlled mobile driven machines and the excellent training culture of the TU Dresden in this field. The TU Dresden will provide the necessary infrastructure for the endowed professorship, and also staff and equipment for the teaching and research activities.
The focuses of work will be on improving mechanical work processes. It is also intended to develop solutions to boost the productivity, precision, energy-efficiency, convenience, safety, robustness, power density and cost-efficiency of construction and building materials machines.
The TU Dresden’s Faculty of Mechanical Science and Engineering is planning to integrate the endowed professorship into the Institute for Fluid Dynamics (IFD). The professorships for “FluidMechatronic System Technology” and “Construction Machines” are thus intended to interact, and to generate numerous synergies between the specific technical disciplines.
