PROFILE: PROFESSOR DR REINHART POPRAWE


light, especially as a tool for industrial production. Within the cluster, Poprawe and the university’s Digital Photonic Production Research Center also initiated a strategic network of 16 institutes from six faculties of RWTH Aachen, which now cooperate in the field of fundamental research of photonic technologies. In addition to helping shape technological


progress in photonics, Poprawe has also dedicated much of his career towards building up the next generation of young talent for the industry. In his time as a


professor at RWTH Aachen, not only was he recognised as the first assessor of more than 200 doctorates, but his students awarded him the teaching prize of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of RWTH Aachen four times. His work has also been recognised with


numerous other awards throughout his impressive career, including the Arthur L Schawlow Award and the Peter M Baker Leadership Award of The Laser Institute (LIA), the Joseph von Fraunhofer Prize, the Innovation Prize of the State of North


Rhine-Westphalia, the Fraunhofer coin, and an honorary professorship of Tshingua University in Beijing. He has also held numerous fellowships and board positions, one of which was with the LIA, for which he served as the president 2012. While Poprawe hasn’t revealed in detail what he plans to do during his retirement, it was hinted in a recent article by Trumpf that, at the age of 12 Poprawe was astonished to hear that there was no map of the universe, and that addressing this could well be on the cards for him over the coming years! l


A MOMENT OF REFLECTION


In advance of Professor Poprawe’s retirement, we caught up with him for a moment of reflection on his career.


LSE: What led to you to pursuing a career in laser technology? RP: In 1977 I had the opportunity to study for one year at the California State University in Fresno and San Francisco. During an excursion visit to the largest laser system in the world at this time, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, I thought: ‘This is wonderful technology, but we should also be able to make innovations that will directly affect our economy and society.’ After returning to Germany, there were two groups working on kilowatt-class lasers for industrial materials processing. I joined the one which later came to be the core of today’s Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT in Aachen. LSE: How has the role of laser technology in materials processing and manufacturing progressed throughout your career? RP: The applications have grown significantly. Today, we talk about a market of approximately $14bn worldwide; 20 years ago, it was maybe one tenth of that. In addition, totally new markets have started, like the additive manufacturing of metals, cleaning, polishing and lately ultrafast ablation by sub-picosecond laser systems. We started working on this technology with 1W average power in 1996 and quickly led the world record average power, which today is at the multi- kilowatt level.


LSE: How would you say the relationship between research institutes, universities and industry has developed throughout your career? RP: Fraunhofer represents the inherent model of integrating education in a university institute with an applied research infrastructure under national governance. The model was established 70 years ago and has proven to be extremely successful.


In the meantime, we have


extended this model in Aachen to what we call the Aachen Campus, the idea of ‘company matriculation’, which is based on a cooperation between university and research needs. The vision is endorsed by the idea ‘research tomorrow means knowing, where which kind of knowledge is created’. In the cluster Digital Photonic Production, which I founded and have led until today, we combine ten university transdisciplinary institutes, four laser RWTH Aachen university chairs and Fraunhofer ILT with about 20 cooperating companies. Altogether, about 800 people work in this model, on fundamental, new processes


“If you have a strong curiosity for ‘what’s next’ in the world, photonics and lasers are an extremely rewarding field”


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Professor Poprawe discusses the education and research of tomorrow with Dr Peter Leibinger, Professor Burkhard Rauhut, and Professor Alfred Gossner


to generate industrially relevant market innovations in lasers and their applications. LSE: Could you give an example of one of the many highlights of your time in the laser industry? RP: Definitely a highlight about how flexible and contact-free laser applications can be was the treatment of approximately 200 disc rotors as built in the German high-speed trains in the 1990s. The discs were non-symmetric and needed cuts in the suspension to allow for thermal expansion during operation. For several months, one train was treated in the MRO terminals of Hamburg every night. Not one cut failed and all trains now run safely! LSE: Going forward what do you think are some important developments or trends taking place in laser technology that will have a significant impact on future materials processing and manufacturing? RP: Additive manufacturing and high-rate ultrafast material removal/ablation are of course future core subjects. In medical applications we expect much


higher impact in therapy and analysis due to the advent of flexibly selectable wavelengths. The bio-printing of cells and organic materials are also on the horizon and, last but not least, the exploitation of quantum properties of entangled photons will lead to totally new applications. LSE: And finally, what would you say to the young physicists and engineers out there considering a career in laser technology? RP: If you have a strong curiosity for ‘what’s next’ in the world, photonics and lasers are an extremely rewarding field for scientific studies. If you are looking for entrepreneurial activities and come from the other side – the markets – and encounter the unique manufacturing characteristics of digital photonic production, you should take a close look at what we are accomplishing in laser technology and join us. Lots of innovations wait to be brought alive. We have spun off about 40 companies in the last 30 years – as we say in Germany: ‘Es ist immer Gründerzeit!’.


AUTUMN 2019 LASER SYSTEMS EUROPE 13


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