Sustainable research – Paper forming at PtU

Packaging has become a symbol of wasted resources, as pictures of islands of plastic waste in the world's oceans impressively show. We are helping to tackle this problem! The well-known processes of forming technology are ideally suited for sustainable research due to their high productivity.

Nature-based, and thus sustainable, fiber materials such as paper can already replace plastics in many places. However, the processing methods for paper are complex or restrict the variety of geometries, for example. As a natural material, paper is characterized by properties such as anisotropy and inhomogeneity, which poses particularly exciting scientific and process engineering issues in forming technology. These hurdles are the subject of completed as well as current projects in which various forming technology processes are applied to paper and processes are adapted. The processes optimized for paper forming offer a high degree of freedom to manufacture a wide variety of products ranging from food packaging and speaker membranes to facade parts.