With the appointment of Thomas Bachmann as Professor of Automotive Engineering, the central scientific core competencies of the Thuringian Innovation Center Mobility (ThIMo) have been reoccupied.
After the retirement of the ThIMo founder and head of the automotive technology group, Prof. Klaus Augsburg, with Prof. Bachmann all five research areas of the innovation center located at the TU Ilmenau are again under excellent scientific leadership: drive technology, automotive technology, radio and information technology, plastics technology and lightweight construction as well as power electronics and functional integration. Since its foundation 10 years ago, the Thuringian Innovation Center Mobility with its modern research infrastructure has advanced the transfer of research, technology and innovation in the mobility sector throughout Germany, Europe and the world.
The President of TU Ilmenau, Prof. Kai-Uwe Sattler, today presented Prof. Thomas Bachmann with the certificate of appointment as Professor of Automotive Engineering. Starting in the new year, Prof. Bachmann will contribute his expertise to the core competencies of the Automotive Engineering and Powertrain Technology Innovation Center. At the same time, following the retirement of his predecessor Prof. Klaus Augsburg, he will become head of the corresponding group at the TU Ilmenau, which has been renamed from "Kraftfahrzeugtechnik" to "Fahrzeugtechnik". In addition to research, Prof. Bachmann will also be intensively involved in teaching and will train the students of the automotive engineering course. After studying mechanical engineering and working for four years as a research assistant at the Department of Automotive Engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Prof. Thomas Bachmann went to industry in 1997, where he worked for the BMW Group, most recently in the Digital Car, Automated Driving development area, as vehicle project manager of the fully automated driving pilot fleet.
The director of the Thuringian Innovation Center Mobility, Prof. Matthias Hein, is happy to have won Prof. Bachmann as a future colleague and research partner for the Group of Automotive Engineering:
To have filled this ThIMo core competence with an excellent scientist and didactician is for me the crowning achievement of the joint efforts of the ThIMo, the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, the Presidium of the TU Ilmenau and the Thuringian Ministry of Economics and Science.
In addition to the new appointment of Thomas Bachmann as Professor of Automotive Engineering, the scientific officer responsible for the ThIMo core area of Power Electronics and Functional Integration, Prof. Tobias Reimann, will also be available to the Innovation Center on a long-term basis after the endowed professorship in Industrial Electronics was made permanent in the summer (UNIonline reported). With the completion of this scientific staffing, the Thuringian Innovation Center for Mobility can purposefully expand its almost 11 years of successful research and development work in all fields. Supported by state-of-the-art technological equipment in measuring and testing facilities, it develops technologies across disciplinary boundaries and in close cooperation with research institutions and industry for safe and networked, environmentally friendly and resource-saving, low-emission and efficient mobility of the future.
As recently as October, the Thuringian Innovation Center for Mobility signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the automotive thuringia industry association to jointly tackle the challenges of digitizing mobility, decarbonizing the economy, and transferring technology and qualifying skilled workers. The interdisciplinary cooperation in ThIMo, in which scientists from 13 groups and four departments of TU Ilmenau work, has resulted in numerous large research and development projects, not only with partners from Thuringia, but also in Germany, Europe and worldwide. A year ago, for example, a large-scale German-Japanese research project was launched, led on the German side by TU Ilmenau's High Frequency and Microwave Technology Group, which aims to make highly automated vehicles safe for traffic. Scientists and development engineers from German and Japanese companies and research institutions are developing test procedures that will help vehicle manufacturers in the future to prove the safety of new self-driving vehicles even before they are approved.