Thanks to Cynthia Michalkowski – doctoral researcher at Bosch and the University of Stuttgart – we had the great chance to visit the Bosch Research Campus in Renningen (near Stuttgart). On January 14th, 2019, she organised a guided tour through the campus and introduced researchers who presented us recent research projects at Bosch. First, we got an impression about the company in general and particularly about Bosch CR (corporate research). Afterwards we could dive deeper into certain topics, such as the research on fuel cells – a technical topic, which is strongly related to SFB 1313’s research on porous media and their interfaces. After a theoretical introduction, we were able to visit the fuel cell laboratory where various experimental set-ups were on display.
A second topic was the project “Smart Agriculture“, concerning two publicly supported projects (Flourish (EU) and MartA (DE)). The interdisciplinary research group investigates for instance, how much pesticide spraying against weeds is necessary on agricultural fields and how to adapt appropriately the volume of pesticides with the help of certain algorithms and technical weed detection tools. A further topic was “Simulation at Bosch CR”: which programs and tools do researchers at Bosch use and how is simulation integrated in Bosch's general feasibility and design process analysis?
The excursion was a very good opportunity to explore technical fields of application related to SFB 1313’s fundamental research of porous media and their interfaces.