HE-Personal: Programme "FH-Personal" BMBF Project at Esslingen University of Applied Sciences

The work on "Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Technologies" is undertaken in collaboration with research and industrial partners with the aim of further developing applications of the fuel cell systems in mobile and stationary systems. Topic-related lectures will be offered at Esslingen University to disseminate the results obtained. This research area addresses several subjects, including modelling and characterisation of fuel cell stacks; load spectrum determination as a real-world application; and the determination of ageing affects based on the load spectrum analyses. The research will investigate the design of suitable measures to increase the lifetime (incl. energy management concepts) of fuel cells, which will be implemented on a test rig or test vehicle to prove they bring about an improvement to the ageing behaviour.

The "Digital Twin" research area works with digital twins of industrial systems and immersive visualisation methods of mixed reality (e.g. augmented reality and virtual reality) and modern technologies for intuitive human-machine interaction (e.g. gesture recognition or voice control). The work in this research area deals with issues such as how to intuitively and immersively integrate multimodal human-model interactions in mixed reality environments using the example of industrial production, or how to reduce positioning errors when visualising the digital twin in a real environment in the context of mixed-reality-in-the-loop simulations—errors which arise through sampling and latency operations between industrial controls and mixed reality terminal devices.

Investigating these research issues creates the necessary basis for potential applications in machine and plant construction, for example for the immersive, virtual commissioning of control systems or staff training. The research results are continuously evaluated together with partners in industry and incorporated into teaching modules at Esslingen University.

This research area is designed to allow individuals with an entrepreneurial but responsible mindset to realise their potential in order for society to cope with the disruptive digital and environmental transformation of the economy and the socio-economic challenges of society.  They contribute to a dynamic and internationally competitive economy through innovative enterprises. The research area also supports opportunity-oriented start-ups, which utilise technical innovations to make an important contribution for the environment and society and create valuable jobs.

The research area "Entrepreneurship" thus deals with the following scientific topics in the areas of entrepreneurship and innovation:

• Digital entrepreneurial process and innovation strategy
• Sustainable entrepreneurial finance
• Transdisciplinary entrepreneurial education for tech-entrepreneurs

This division includes both doctoral and postdoctoral research. The research results are developed and evaluated with industry partners; they add to the further scientific development of the Centre for Entrepreneurship at Esslingen University. With this applied research design, we increase the comparative competitive advantage of Esslingen University.

Innovations relating to nursing, medicine and technology are very important for the regional and national provision of healthcare. Providing people with healthcare is a complex undertaking: many chronically ill people use technical aids prescribed by nursing and medical staff, who evaluate their effect and provide advice. This means that technical aids are currently undergoing rapid development.

Esslingen University can play a special role when it comes to making headway with the scientific development and practical trials because it has the necessary key academic disciplines—management, nursing and technology—and close links with the respective fields of practical application. However, the academisation of the nursing sciences has only recently taken place, and the number of people for a professorial appointment is still very low. As a result, there is an urgent need to enable the necessary qualification of prospective professors.

Through HE-Personal, Esslingen University provides these prospective professors with the best possible training and in the faculty’s newest sub-fields, which are tackled through the “Interdisciplinary Collaboration between Nursing, Medicine and Technology" research area.

“IT Security” is a cutting-edge subject associated with all of the project research areas and is of crucial importance for the high-tech businesses in and around Stuttgart. The rapidly advancing digitalisation of business processes and the ever-increasing effects of digitalisation on our daily life in particular mean that both the potential danger for cyber attacks as well as the number of points of attack are continually increasing. At the same time, companies are confronted with regulatory stipulations which are rapidly becoming more demanding.

While the availability of IT security experts in the job market is so drastically low that graduates can expect to find extremely attractive positions in all branches in the future, currently hardly any people in the job market are qualified and suitable for teaching posts at universities of applied sciences. It is still difficult to recruit and retain professors in this field, leading to a shortage in teaching and hence in training as well. To counteract this shortage, one research area is concentrating on “IT Security”.

The "Power-to-X" research area will collaborate with research and industry partners to further develop applications for storing electricity generated from renewable resources in diverse energy carriers or raw materials. Topic-related lectures will be offered at Esslingen University to disseminate the results obtained. The research area addresses several aspects, including hydrogen generation by means of electrolysis and downstream plasma-induced methanation; optimisation of PV systems and wind turbines in combination with electrolysis plants; and high-pressure electrolysis to use the hydrogen in mobile applications. The participating researchers will investigate suitable business models with the aim of making the installations marketable, test them by implementing them in real energy and material systems, and validate the processes on test rigs they have developed themselves.

The main task of "Prognostics and Health Management (PHM)“ is to diagnose and prognosticate state of degradation of technical systems. The diagnosis and prognosis are often conducted using data-driven methods, which originate from the fields of statistics and machine learning. They are based on the statistical modelling of existing training data and therefore require a comprehensive amount of training data to be used in a purposeful way.

However, sufficient training data are seldom available for industrial PHM applications because generating data on the state of degradation of a technical system is usually very time-consuming and expensive. A possible solution—being investigated in this HE-Personal sub-project–consists of compensating for this lack of training data through the incorporation of process knowledge. This approach at finding a solution is an example of so-called theory-guided data science and involves incorporating various knowledge states. It begins by incorporating individual, physics-based laws into the training process and extends to the integration of detailed physical degradation models forming part of hybrid model ensembles.