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Sustainability at TU
Studierende sitzt am Arbeitsplatz und schaut auf den Laptop. © Aliona Kardash​/​TU Dortmund
Promotion of a Digital Hub

Making the automotive industry more sustainable

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  • TU News
A group photo of people in front of posters © Lehrstuhl IIM
The stakeholders are working together on a sustainable circular economy for the automotive industry.
Creating low-threshold access to circular-enabled value creation in the automotive industry is the goal of the DIONA project (Digitales Ökosystem für eine nachhaltige Kreislaufwirtschaft in der Automobilindustrie), which is funded by Projektträger Karlsruhe (PTKA) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) with a total of around 3.3 million euros for three years. The project is led by the Chair of Industrial Information Management (Prof. Boris Otto) at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. Also involved from TU Dortmund University are the Department of IT in Production and Logistics (Prof. Markus Rabe) from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and the Sociology of Technology research area of the Social Research Center Dortmund from the Faculty of Social Sciences. Further cooperation partners are the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST in Dortmund and the TU Chemnitz.

As a scientific accompanying project in the BMBF's funding line "Towards sustainable mobility through circular value creation (MobilKreis)", DIONA is overseeing twelve practice-oriented collaborative projects that are developing innovative system solutions for a more sustainable as well as circular production and use of vehicles together with companies from the automotive and mobility industries. DIONA will support these projects with a specially developed Digital Hub and work on overarching research questions. In addition, transfer events and cyberphysical laboratories will make the findings from the project accessible to an interested public and in particular to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Components are to be reused

Production in the automotive sector is hand in hand with high resource utilization and emissions pollution. The aim of the project is therefore to promote a circular economy by refurbishing and reusing existing components instead of continuously producing new ones and thus consuming valuable resources. A good example of this are batteries in electric vehicles, which require rare earth elements for their production. Reprocessing these at the end of their life cycle significantly improves sustainability and efficiency.

"In order to be able to feed as many components as possible into the value-added cycle, we are using DIONA to analyze across all collaborative projects what data and information is needed both during production and during use," explains project leader Prof. Boris Otto: "Headlights or body parts, for example, could also be reused - but so far too little data has been collected and too little of the existing information has been evaluated. We would like to change that."

Further information

Contact for queries:

Picture credits: (f.l.) Antonio Isopp (Social Research Center sfs, TU Dortmund), Marlon Philipp (sfs, TU Dortmund), Robert Schmelzer (TU Chemnitz), Christoph Hoppe (Fraunhofer ISST), Joachim Hunker (Department of IT in Production and Logistics ITPL, TU Dortmund), Tennessee Schrage (TU Chemnitz), Benjamin Koch (TU Chemnitz), Stephanie Winkelmann (Chair of Industrial Information Management IIM, TU Dortmund), Fabienne Schnieders (IIM, TU Dortmund), Katharina Langenbach (ITPL, TU Dortmund) and Hendrik van der Valk (IIM, TU Dortmund).

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