During Techtextil 2024 in Frankfurt, the Walter Reiners Foundation of the VDMA presented awards to six successful young engineers for academic work on textile innovation.

Promotion Awards of €3,500 were presented to Fabio Bussmann of RWTH Aachen for his thesis on life cycle assessments of alternative geotextiles, to Katharina Maria Ernst of TU Dresden, for the development of a process for the treatment of chitosan fibres as an alternative raw material for carbon fibres, and to Lennart Hellwig of RWTH Aachen University, for his work on machine learning in a nonwovens plant.

Sustainable Awards of €3,000 were also presented to Anna Markic of Reutlingen University for her work on the recycling of carbon fibres, to Mark Zenzinger of Albstadt-Sigmaringen University, for his study on automating the process chain for the production of welded textile hard goods, and to Lena Fink of TU Dresden for her construction engineering project on a device to simplify the maintenance of braiding machines.

www.vdma.org