At the start of this year, the Aachen Center for Integrative Lightweight Production (AZL) moved into offices and a machinery hall of its own in one of the new cluster buildings – the cluster for production technology. One of Europe’s biggest research landscapes is being created on the RWTH Aachen Campus, with 16 new research clusters over a surface area of 2.5 km2. The new AZL building houses extensive series-production equipment for industrial pre-series production as well as individual offices and a co-working section for partner companies.
The AZL was set up jointly at the start of 2012 by Professors Christian Hopmann, IKV, and Christian Brecher from the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL) at RWTH Aachen. The aim of IKV and WZL was to bring together and industrialise the lightweight construction activities of the individual institutes and thus close the gap between the fundamental research carried out at the institutes and the development work conducted in the companies.