FSK promotes young talents in the industry

The objective of the FSK Innovation Award is not only to honour future-oriented ideas, but also to promote young talents and support cooperation between the award winners and potential industrial partners. The association receives applications for the Innovation Award from young professionals, mostly students, as well as companies in which specialists are working on innovative technologies, products and applications. The jury’s evaluation is based on the following criteria: innovation, marketability, competitiveness, and material-oriented implementation and, depending on the category, technical feasibility or design.

The trio Dorothee Clasen, Sascha Praet and Adam Pajonk received the Innovation Award in the category "Young Talents – Technology". For their project, the students developed the new "InFoam Printing" technology with the support of the company Covestro. By injecting synthetic resin, it was possible to achieve a partial stiffening of soft foams and a resulting functional integration. This clever innovation has great potential for use in industrial production, including the optimization of mattresses.

In the same category, the cooperation project of the specialist team Benedikt Kilian (Covestro Deutschland AG), Wolfgang Hinz (KraussMaffei Technologies GmbH) and Lorenz Wruck (Institute for Plastics Processing (IKV) at RWTH Aachen University) received an award for the "Industrialization of the pultrusion process for polyurethane". Fill GmbH from Gurten was also among the award-winners in the "Technology" category. Their "Polyurethane refines wood" project uses a special camera technology to detect colour and geometric defects in the wood and then uses a low-pressure metering system to repair them with polyurethane.

In the category “Design and construction” Birgit Hengstebeck from the University Wuppertal (BUW) was delighted to accept the award for the development of her visually and functionally attractive bed system "YOYO – simply sleep differently", which offers good prospects for conventional marketing. The FSK awarded a special art prize to Nadine Baldow from the University of the Arts Berlin. She experimented with "Polyurethane foam as an artificial medium for space-consuming and site-specific installations combined with the question: What relationship do we have to nature? Exciting and expressive, her art stimulates reflection on nature, environment and toxicity.