Performance and safety for energy and environmental technology

Critical components such as turbine blades, pressure vessels, pipelines, or supporting structures are often subjected to extreme static and dynamic loads – caused by wind, waves, earthquakes, pressure cycles, or thermal gradients. Ensuring their structural integrity under these complex loads while accurately predicting their fatigue life is a key challenge to avoid unexpected failures, safety risks, and costly downtime, often balancing robustness with lightweight design.

Maximizing energy efficiency and minimizing emissions requires detailed optimization of heat transfer processes and flow behavior. Inefficiencies caused by high pressure drops, flow separation, uneven temperature distributions (hot spots), or fouling in heat exchangers, combustion chambers, cooling circuits, or filter systems must be identified and minimized to save fuel, increase performance, and control material stress.

Many systems in energy and environmental engineering exhibit complex interactions between different physical domains (e.g., thermomechanics, fluid-structure interactions, electrothermomechanics). Adequately understanding and predicting these couplings presents a significant challenge, as isolated analyses often lead to erroneous or incomplete results, and critical interactions can be overlooked.

Rotating machines (generators, pumps, turbines), flow-carrying systems, and large structures can induce unwanted vibrations that can lead to material fatigue, noise pollution, reduced comfort, or malfunctions. At the same time, noise emissions from systems (e.g., wind turbines, power plants, fans) must be analyzed and reduced to comply with legal limits and ensure acceptance in the surrounding area.

Modern plants generate vast amounts of operational data (SCADA, sensors). Effectively using this data to optimize performance during operation, monitor condition monitoring, and quickly identify the root cause in the event of a fault is a major challenge. Often, a combination of data analysis with physical models and targeted measurements is required.

Materials in this industry are often exposed to extreme conditions: high or cryogenic temperatures, high pressures, aggressive or corrosive media, and radiation. Accurately understanding and long-term predicting their behavior (e.g., creep, embrittlement, corrosion, degradation) under these real-world operating conditions is essential, as is reliable experimental determination of material properties for precise simulations.