Neil Bates, Director at Creactive Design Transport, to talk at the 26th International Dresden Lightweight Engineering Symposium.
Session 6: Technology Transfer – FRIDAY, 23.06.2023
Innovative Lightweight Design for Sustainable Rail Vehicles
There is an initiative ‘New European Bauhaus’ which seeks to make the green deal a human-centred more tangible experience to make important new connections and realities.
The pandemic has shown how many topics are interrelated and that new thinking comes from breaking silos just as the Bauhaus did around 100 years ago.
This time the movement has the opportunity to embrace other goals
- Sustainability (including circularity)
- Quality of experience and better functionality
- Inclusivity (which must include affordability)
More details to follow….
Neutral Lightweight Engineering – moving Europe.
The last year has taught us what high dynamics really mean. Certainties have dissolved and our European view of the world has changed. Within a year, topics such as geostrategy, energy shortages and resource availability have slipped into broad social debate. From our point of view, behind these discussions often lies the desire for economic independence, which we have always thought of only in a global context since the mid-1990s. However, we see that alliances that are more than 70 years old can break within a few months, so that despite all globalisation, we have to rely more on our own strengths and the development of our capabilities again. The necessary technological sovereignty, however, can only emerge from firm European action. This task applies not only to politics, but above all to science.
For many years, the International Dresden Lightweight Symposium has addressed the aspects of raw material supply and resource efficiency and the related topics of circular economy and recycling. The tasks are not new, but they are now in a new context. Lightweight construction continues to enable the restructuring of our social market economy towards an ecologically sustainable growth model. From our point of view, the changed framework conditions, for example with regard to securing the energy supply, act as a catalyst, so that system lightweight construction is now being given the role that it has always had.
Against this background, this year we want to examine the effects of these tectonic shifts on science and industry and discuss the response of the European lightweight construction community to the broken guard rails. Aspects of new, climate-friendly materials will be discussed on an equal footing with their applications from rail to road, water and air transport. We want to shed light on the question of unsteady energy availability by providing answers to new process and process technology, which we need in order to be able to manufacture lightweight structures suitable for series production in the future.
Take advantage of this opportunity and take part in a lively exchange between top-class representatives from science and industry as well as politics and society when the pioneers of European lightweight construction meet in Dresden for the 26th time.