The LIT Factory is the pilot factory of the Linz Institute of Technology at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Linz, Upper Austria. The factory aims to cover the whole value chain in polymer processing, including part design, part production and the recycling of components at end of life.
The infrastructure contains a production line for uni-directional fiber-reinforced (UD-) tapes, a fully automated production cell for fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composite structures comprising a tape laying unit for automated fibre placement (ENGEL), a consolidation unit (FILL), a infra-red (IR) heating unit (ENGEL IRO 3) and an injection molding machine (ENGEL DUO 350), all connected by a six-axes robot system (ENGEL easix). In the field of recycling the infrastructure consists of a shredder (Lindner Micromat), a recycling machine (EREMA Intarema) as well as lab scale equipment to implement the washing and sorting processes in plastics recycling. Moreover, the LIT Factory comprises the so-called Smart Quality Lab, with equipment to characterize the input and output material stream for the recycling process, e.g. gas-chromatography with mass spectroscopy (GC-MS, Perkin Elmer),
IR spectroscopy combined with thermo gravimetric analysis TGA (Perkin Elmer), differential scanning calorimetry (DCS, Perkin Elmer), melt flow indexer (Zwick Roell) and others.
Services provided by the LIT Factory are the conduction of research as well as education and training programs. Moreover, the equipment is used to demonstrate new concepts in polymer processing and recycling (test before invest).
Education
The LIT Factory is used within several courses of the polymer technologies and science study program at the JKU as well as during the conduction of bachelor, master and PhD thesis. Beside the education on university level, a service of the LIT Factory is the development and conduction of training programs for company partners with a strong focus on small and medium-sized companies. In the near future, the LIT Factory will be part of the European Digital Innovation Hub and will offer a number of training programs together with other Austrian and European Universities and Institutions.
Research
The main research fields are :
• polymer processing with a strong focus on the production of endless fiber-reinforced composite structures
• mechanical recycling of plastic products (post-industrial and post-consumer)
• process digitalization and digital transformation in polymer processing
In topic (1) a main research target is to investigate the process – structure – property relationship for composite parts. To gain deeper understanding of the processes this research is accompanied by the development of digital process models and twin that should further be used to develop assistance systems to support the process setup and optimization (topic (2)). In topic (3) the research includes the recycling process itself but also incorporates the life cycle assessment of polymer products.
Industry cooperation
The cooperation with industry is done in funded or contract research projects. Contract research are often but not necessarily smaller projects, e.g. a Bachelor or Master thesis to conduct a first feasibility analysis. Moreover, we provide the possibility to test new processing equipment or concepts (test before invest) and offer training programs for SME.
