Whether sustainable mobility, the best possible medical care or new approaches and solutions in IT: outstanding and forward-looking research for a green and digital transformation in Europe is the focus of TU Ilmenau’s Scientific Year 2025 "Research for Europe". To this end, the university maintains long-standing international research collaborations and is constantly expanding its network through new partnerships in Europe. The Scientific Year 2025 will be kicked off on Wednesday, 8 January 2025, at 5 p.m. in the Humboldtbau with a lecture by Valentin Ivanov. As an expert for smart vehicle systems and SAE Fellow, the scientist in the Control Engineering Group at the Department of Computer Science and Automation has has been involved the industry’s transition to sustainable mobility technologies in a number of EU projects. At the university’s Science Forum, he will present successfully completed and current research projects at TU Ilmenau, in which work is being carried out on software-defined and next-generation electric vehicles across national borders. All university members and interested parties are cordially invited to the event.
"We are convinced," says Vice President for Research and Young Scientists Professor Stefan Sinzinger: "European research at the highest international level can only reach its full potential through intensive exchange. And only together with our globally engaged partners in Europe will we find interdisciplinary answers to the increasingly complex issues and social challenges of our time."
Dr. Valentin Ivanov also knows that many demanding technical problems can hardly or not be solved at all’using conventional modelling and experimental approaches. Many of the concepts for electromobility that he helped to develop in cooperation with the Thuringian Center for Innovation in Mobility (ThIMo) under Professor Klaus Augsburg have been incorporated into electric cars that are sold on the European automotive market today. As an European Climate Pact Ambassador, he is also committed to building a greener Europe and implementing measures for climate neutrality by 2050.
In his presentation, Dr. Ivanov covers the entire range from the first cooperative European research projects on electromobility at ThIMo to current EU projects at TU Ilmenau on the further development of electric and software-defined vehicles (SDV) in collaboration with scientists at ThIMo under the direction of Professor Matthias Hein. While this research initially focused on the question of how the fundamental requirements and challenges of electromobility can be solved, the vision of the European research and industry partners today is to jointly develop reliable, comfortable and affordable electric vehicles as quickly and easily as possible with the help of geographically distributed laboratories virtually connected in a so-called X-in-the-loop network - and thus help sustainable mobility suitable for the mass market to achieve a breakthrough for climate protection.
"In this way, we not only generate valuable interdisciplinary knowledge in order to identify unexpected and hidden connections between the various processes more flexibly and quickly than if the steps were carried out one after the other. At the same time, we are also creating an open and inclusive experimental space for researchers throughout Europe," says Dr. Ivanov.
The experimental approach will be used in a new EU-wide research project to test a mobile platform for automated electric vehicles with next-generation 1200V drives and unprecedented charging speeds. Dr. Valentin Ivanov will explain in his lecture at the start of the new Scientific Year at TU Ilmenau how exactly the collaboration in the virtually networked laboratory across many national borders works and what other goals the new Participation is possible both on site in the Humboldtbau and online. External interested parties can register at vpf@tu-ilmenau.de for online participation.
