Second FOMOP-Meeting in Jülich

The end-of-year sprint is also on the agenda for the Modellfabrik Papier (FOMOP) research cluster. At the end of November, all of the research teams from the seven partners in the Modellfabrik Papier research project, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, came together for three days at the MFP’s interim location at the Jülich Research Centre. Time for intensive exchange, workshops and group work to consolidate, compare and advance the work in the four main research areas with many individual work packages, and to think ahead. Cooperative work at it’s best! “Collaborative work in such a large research network, in which the individual teams are scattered throughout Germany, is what makes us strong”, says MFP managing director Peter Bekaert with conviction. “Our open innovation approach has proven to be a particular strength.”

This refers to the search for the ‘non-obvious’. This approach, which is now well known in management, fits perfectly into the research landscape. “Open innovation aims to avoid navel-gazing in the search for truly fundamentally new solutions”, says Bekaert. Real innovations arise when a problem is viewed from completely different perspectives and relevant external knowledge is incorporated into the distributed idea generation. In the Modellfabrik Papier research cluster, minds from a wide range of research disciplines come together to find solutions for the paper industry that go beyond familiar horizons.

Along the paper machine, the fundamental research project is investigating the various closely coordinated process stages to determine

• how the properties of fibres and the raw materials used can be modified chemically or enzymatically so that they consume less energy and fewer resources in the subsequent process
• how the energy required to dry a wet paper web can be technologically reduced
• how paper could be produced with considerably less water or even without water at all
• and what the various approaches ultimately achieve in terms of energy savings.

The findings from the application of computational fluid dynamics in various work packages were also discussed, as was the potential of computational chemistry. Both methods are not yet widely used in research and development in the paper industry, but they offer promising potential. The shareholders of the Modellfabrik Papier then caught up on the status of the research work. The abundance of positive feedback on the research developments of the Modellfabrik Papier continues to motivate the research teams to push ahead with their work with great vigour and team spirit. The good news also includes the fact that in the FOMOP network, 70% of the staff at the MFP and 7 of the 7 network partners and 95% of the research partners were able to be hired last year. Thus, in 2024, the joint project under the umbrella of the Modellfabrik Papier has fully developed its potential and has been able to get the operational research work off the ground with promising approaches. The next research year has been designated ‘Science Year Future Energy’ by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research together with the initiative ‘Wissenschaft im Dialog’ (Science in Dialogue). What could be a better fit for our research mission?