Austrian competence center for tribology

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Austrian Competence Center for Tribology
(AC2T research)
logo
legal form GmbH
founding 2002
Seat Wiener Neustadt
purpose Research and development in tribology
Managing directors Andreas Pauschitz, Friedrich Franek
sales approx. 13 million EUR (2019)
Employees approx. 150 (2019)
Website ac2t.at

The Austrian Center for Tribology (English: Austrian Center for Tribology , acronym AC²T research , AC²T) is an application-oriented research center in the field of tribology based in Vienna . In addition to research, the center also provides development services as well as material analysis and characterization methods for solving industrial tasks. The main location has been at the local technology and research center in Wiener Neustadt since it was founded . Since 2017 there has also been an operating point in the Techcenter Linz in Linz .

history

AC²T was developed as part of a project in the Austrian Competence Center Program K plus (which has been continued as the COMET Center of Excellence program since 2010 ) as a science-industry cooperation, under the leadership of the Austrian Tribological Society, and with the participation of the Vienna University of Technology , Founded by 3 companies as well as several scientists and industrial consultants in July 2002 and still has a very similar shareholder structure today. The Competence Center for Tribology is one of the world's largest independent, privately organized, not-for-profit research centers in tribology .

In summer 2009, AC²T announced the evaluation of the first funding period with the COMET research project " XTribology - Excellence Center of Tribology ". This success secured the competence center project budgets of around 100 million euros for 10 years (until March 2020). In 2016, the co-owner and then Scientific Director of the Competence Center, Friedrich Franek, received the world's most important award in tribology, the Tribology Gold Medal 2016.

The COMET research project " InTribology - Tribology Intelligence - Customized Tribology for Industrial Innovation ", applied for by AC²T in 2018, was evaluated in terms of content by an international jury as part of a competition process in May 2019, approved by the funding federal ministries on the basis of the jury assessment, and will start in April 2020 . The research project has two periods with a total duration of eight years and a research volume of around 44 million euros per period.

Areas of activity and research

The competence center researches the field of tribology . Researchers from the fields of chemistry, physics, materials science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering / mechatronics, biology and computer science research theoretically and experimentally material surface and interface interactions (especially with lubricants and fuels) with a focus on friction, wear and the use of lubricants. The development of wear protection layers, the development of sensor systems for tribological parameters, the characterization of lubricants and their aging, the simulation of tribological mechanisms on an atomic to macroscopic scale, the description of the tribochemical corrosion associated with friction processes are just as much work results as laboratory set-ups for determining Friction and wear. The research results are regularly published in the form of peer-reviewed articles in specialist journals, specialist books or at specialist conferences.

The competence center carries out application-oriented basic research and innovation research together with project partners from industry and science, as well as research and development services for industrial clients. The partner network includes more than 100 industrial partners and more than 40 university and non-university research partners.

The activities of the competence center are organized in four research areas:

" Friction- optimized systems " aims at the functionally relevant surface and material design of functional (mechanical) components with a focus on reliability and energy efficiency. Knowledge from the system level to the nano level (or to atomic mechanisms) is used for this. The implementation of the knowledge in the real application is achieved through a suitable "digital twin" approach. The combination of simulation and model experiments enables the development of transfer functions in a hardware-in-the-loop environment, which enables the description of the real friction behavior of a tribological system under real load conditions.

" Wear- Reduction Strategies for Industry " places a special emphasis on tribologically stressed systems under rough ambient conditions, wear-resistant materials and surfaces, as well as on condition monitoring and maintenance methods for this. Using data-driven wear models, a deeper understanding of how materials and coatings wear under high temperatures and / or a corrosive environment is developed. Based on this, wear protection strategies and selected laser-based technologies for surface coating are developed.

"Sustainable lubrication " deals with the current technological and ecological challenges to the holistic design of future lubricants and lubrication concepts and is essentially based on the "Green Tribology" philosophy. Through the combined use of numerical and experimental tools, tailor-made lubricants are designed on different size scales (macro to atomic). Based on this, data-driven prediction models are developed in order to assess the performance and service life of both lubricants and the lubricated systems.

The strategic research area " Synaptic Tribology " brings together different specialist areas and knowledge from basic tribology research in an active development process for novel tribodesign solutions (to predict the performance of these solutions in real applications). By consistently applying the latest data science methods to all available data sources and combining them with multi-scale simulations, high-quality experimental techniques and advanced chemical-physical analysis methods, the goal of data-driven research in tribology is opened up and thus digitization in tribological research and development driven forward.

European projects

The competence center's entry into R&D projects of the European Union took place in 2006 as coordinator of the Marie Curie research training network WEMESURF. Other EU project participations followed, such as B. the participation as a consortium member in the "Joint Undertaking Shift2Rail" in the period 2016 to 2022. In the period 2019 to 2022 the competence center u. a. the European innovation project I-TRIBOMAT and a. from 2019 to 2023 as a partner in the research project triboREMEDY.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Biegelbauer: How does politics learn? Cape. 7: “Kplus” competence center program . Ed .: Springer Fachmedien. Springer, Wiesbaden 2013, ISBN 978-3-531-18591-0 , pp. 145–172 ( springerprofessional.de ).
  2. ↑ FFG Focus - COMET Centers and Projects . In: Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH - FFG (Hrsg.): Brochure . FFG, Vienna June 2013, p. 22-23 ( ffg.at [PDF]).
  3. ↑ Shareholder of AC²T research GmbH. AC2T research GmbH, 2019, accessed on December 31, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Gerd Müller: "COMET - a successful model in applied R&D". In: website. Austria Press Agency, "Science" section, April 30, 2015, accessed on February 5, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b "K2" research centers on biotechnology and tribology. In: newspaper. DerStandard, October 29, 2009, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  6. ^ Tribology Gold Medal. In: website. Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 2020, accessed January 5, 2020 .
  7. ^ Tribology gold medal for Prof. Friedrich Franek . In: NEW BUSINESS Verlag GmbH (Ed.): Special issue . NEW BUSINESS Verlag GmbH, Vienna April 2017, p. 11 ( newbusiness.at ).
  8. ↑ a b APA-OTS: Millions in funding for COMET Competence Center for Tribology. In: online magazine. Wn24, June 18, 2019, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Comet research centers receive 39 million euros. In: newspaper. DerStandard, June 9, 2019, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  10. ↑ A. Pauschitz et al .: Chapter 6: High Temperature Sliding Wear of Thermal Sprayed Coatings in "Thermal spray coatings and their tribological performances" . Ed .: Roy Manish, Davim J. Paulo. Engineering Science Reference - IGI Global, ISBN 978-1-4666-7489-9 , pp. 163-192 .
  11. ↑ AC2T research GmbH industrial partner network. 2019, accessed December 31, 2019 .
  12. ↑ AC2T research GmbH science partner network. 2019, accessed December 31, 2019 .
  13. ↑ Norbert Regitnig-Tillian: Digital twin lets machines live longer. In: The Standard Research Special - Online. Der Standard, October 7, 2017, accessed December 31, 2019 .
  14. ↑ WEMESURF Fact sheet. In: website. Cordis - European Commission, accessed January 2, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Shift2Rail. In: website. Shift2Rail - A body of European Union, accessed on January 2, 2020 .
  16. ↑ I-TRIBOMAT Fact sheet. In: website. Cordis - European Commission, accessed January 2, 2020 .
  17. ↑ triboREMEDY fact sheet. In: website. Cordis - European Commission, accessed January 2, 2020 .