Awards For Outstanding Achievements In Textile Engineering
At the Aachen-Dresden-Denkendorf International Textile Conference held in Aachen at the end of November, Peter D. Dornier, Chairman of the Walter Reiners Foundation of the VDMA, honoured five emerging engineers for their exceptional academic work.
Promotion and sustainability awards were presented across bachelor, project, diploma, and master’s thesis categories, with a focus on innovative and resource-efficient solutions for the textile sector.
The €3,000 sustainability prize in the bachelor’s category was awarded to Jasmin Roos of RWTH Aachen University. Her thesis explored sustainable approaches to textile recycling, specifically investigating how melt-spun yarns could replace non-recyclable elastane to improve material circularity.
In the master’s category, Raphael Wiederkehr of DITF Denkendorf received a €3,500 promotion award. His research evaluated how carding machines influence the quality of mechanically recycled fibres, aiming to minimise yarn and fabric residues and boost the percentage of recycled material in the spinning process. His work centred on automating the process chain for producing welded textile hard goods.
Another €3,500 promotion award in the master’s segment went to Janne Marie Warnecke of RWTH Aachen University. Her thesis focused on FEM-based analysis of stresses and deformation in fabrics during the winding process in weaving machines.
The diploma category promotion award, also valued at €3,500, was presented to Lena Fink from TU Dresden for her forward-looking work on forming multiaxial fabrics into profile preforms—an area of growing relevance for advanced composite applications.
Completing the list of honourees, Yuanjing Cai of TU Dresden received the €3,500 sustainability prize in the diploma category. His research demonstrated how the production of carbon fibres can be made more sustainable by substituting conventional precursors with more eco-friendly alternatives.
