Prof. Dr.-Ing. Roland Lachmayer

Professor Dr.-Ing. Roland Lachmayer has been the founding director of the Institute of Product Development and Equipment Construction (IPeG) since 2011, specializing in key research areas such as development methodology, systems engineering, additive manufacturing, and optomechatronics. In the PhoenixD Excellence Cluster, Prof. Lachmayer leads the research group "Additive and Subtractive Manufacturing ", which focuses on the generative manufacturing of functionally integrated optical systems and the associated process chains.

One project of the research group investigates the use of highly transparent silicone materials to explore the potential of additive manufacturing of optical sensors for direct integration into elastic components. The interdisciplinarily developed sensors are based on the functionalization of elastic silicone waveguides with colloidally dispersed CdS/CdSe quantum dots. An innovative manufacturing process based on so-called "Embedded Printing" was developed to realize these sensors. For the printing process and the produced sensors, a theoretical physical model was developed, forming the basis for verifying functionality in several experiments.

Another project deals with the additive manufacturing of integrated optical sensor systems made of glass and the development and modeling of the associated process chain. A special material is used here, which is structured via a bath-based photopolymerization and then sintered into glass. The aim is to explore the possibilities of how such materials can be used to integrate optical functionalities into glass components.