Renewable energies are increasingly coming into focus in the wake of climate change. The prevention of increasing environmental catastrophes, such as last year's floods, and the dependence on fossil fuels, the negative effects of which have become strongly visible in recent weeks due to the war in Ukraine, demand an inevitable massive expansion of renewable energies in all areas. With the change of government at the federal level, this now seems to be understood and supported politically to the highest degree. In order to implement the energy turnaround on a broad scale, all other available sustainable energy sources must be developed in addition to the rapid expansion of onshore and offshore wind farms and an expansion of photovoltaic systems on the roofs of houses. One energy source that has been virtually untapped to date is wind energy in built-up areas. The expansion of small wind turbines on unused higher roofs is an ecologically and economically sensible way to sustainably develop this energy source. At the SLA, a prototype of such a small wind turbine was developed, built and tested by the applicants out of personal motivation. In order to be able to evaluate the performance of such a system in the medium term, pilot sites are being sought. The elevated flat roofs on almost all RWTH buildings offer an ideal starting situation for sustainable power generation. By using the existing building surfaces, the technology could be tested and evaluated on site. If the benefits are demonstrated to be positive, systems could be installed on all possible RWTH roof locations in a further step. In this way, RWTH can sustainably cover part of its own electricity needs by using its own wind resources. An information offer about the generated electricity can be made visible for all via an "electricity clock" at a central point.

Contact: Institute for Structural Mechanics and Lightweight Design, Professor Kai-Uwe Schröder

Group members of the student council's internal sustainability working group have recognized the problem of increased waste of resources in architectural studies. The current situation requires students to spend sums on A0 prints for presentations that are corrected by the instructor for only 15 minutes and are then disposed of. With weekly corrections, there are further additional expenses for about 30-minute corrections with the respective supervisor. The Corona pandemic has proven that such expenses and especially waste of resources are not mandatory and notes can also be taken on digital media. In order to test this and to enable more sustainable architectural teaching in the long term, we would like to purchase a Promethean Board with the help of the Sustainability Fund. We want to test the technology ourselves as well as lend it to chairs to raise awareness about alternative ways of tutoring. In this way, we also counteract the production of paper waste. Since students find themselves in such situations on a daily basis and this is a major problem, we feel that promoting resource-saving measures with the help of digital methods is a relevant part for our field.

Contact: Architecture Student Council

With the foundation of the Center for Sustainable Hydrogen Systems (CSHS) and the Center for Circular Economy (CCE), a research center of RWTH Aachen University is to be established. The aim of the building is to bundle expertise from all departments on the topics of hydrogen and the circular economy at one location. The newly created focal point for inter- and transdisciplinary research on sustainability topics will serve not only RWTH, but also the networking of stakeholders from industry, local authorities and federal states. Consequently, the research building is intended to make a significant contribution to the scientific discourse on the hydrogen and circular economy and therefore it acts as a lighthouse project. In order for the building project to fulfill this claim and thus also serve as a best-practice example beyond the region, the building itself should be designed in a circular and energy-efficient manner in addition to the implementation of the topics in terms of content. In this respect, the operating energy should be possible from future-oriented, CO2-neutral energy sources. The expertise available in the CSHS and CCE is to be used here in the form of a potential study in order to work out implementation possibilities for a holistically CO2-neutral building. The potential study includes a determination of energy requirements which, among other things, develops potentials for the integration of renewable energies. The use of an energy management system can enable continuous improvement of energy efficiency. By considering the material cycles, the input and potential output of the building fabric can be evaluated to identify future reuse potential of the materials used. At the end of the project, a guideline for cycle-appropriate and energy-optimized research buildings will be developed. The idea for the project resulted from an exchange between the CSHS and the CCE. The CSHS was initiated by a total of over 50 professors from RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich. The CCE was founded in 2021 by 17 professors of RWTH Aachen University.

Contact: Junior professor for recycling in building: Junior Professor Linda Hildebrand

RWTH's building stock contributes significantly to the feeling of isolation in the various campus areas and the city of Aachen. Buildings and surrounding open spaces provide little habitat for animals and plants and often offer an unappealing image and little opportunity for students and employees to identify with their places of work. Building greenery can change this and have a positive effect on all the areas mentioned. However, large-scale building greening is associated with considerable investment and maintenance costs. The applicants from Faculties 2 and 4 and the central university administration therefore want to develop a self-construction kit for building greening together with students. This kit can be made available to students and employees by the university in order to plant smaller roof or facade sections on their own initiative. Due to its small size (self-construction approach), the "BauGrünKit" primarily supports urban biodiversity as a co-productive conservation measure. It provides habitat and food for different animal and plant species and can be adapted to specific species and locations through plant selection. The self-construction idea can be understood as a participatory approach (team-building measure), in that employees jointly install the "BauGrünKit" and jointly maintain the greenery. Through the selection of plants, the approach also holds the potential for appropriation and further development, for example in the direction of "urban gardening." In addition to easy-to-understand (graphically and textually) assembly instructions (multilingual) and intuitive usability, the BauGrünKit should also provide information about the importance of biodiversity, offer tips on how to strengthen biodiversity, and ideally inspire further greening projects. The BauGrünKit - applied in numerous ways - increases the RWTH's low biodiversity, especially in the inner city area. RWTH would thus have an easily applicable building block with which to make its contribution to preserving and strengthening biodiversity visible.

Contact: Institute and Chair of Landscape Architecture, Dr. Alex Timpe

Among the scientific staff of the institute, the question arose some time ago as to what extent a project-specific balancing of the electrical power recorded by the large number of test benches available at the institute would be possible. The background to this is that ifas has various test benches with large electrical connected loads, which are operated continuously at high loads (several hundred kW) for days or weeks during larger map measurements or durability tests. At the same time, the institute is working on the determination of the CO2 footprint in the production and operation of fluid power components as part of publicly funded projects, so that awareness of this issue is constantly growing. The project therefore aims to enable test bench and project-specific power balancing by integrating WLAN-capable power meters at neuralgic points of the institute's internal power grid. This with the aim of, on the one hand, increasing internal awareness of the effects of operation and making operation more efficient and, on the other hand, raising public awareness of this issue by indicating the amounts of energy used to generate data in publications.

Contact: Institute for Fluid Power Drives and Systems, University Professor Katharina Schmitz

The above applicants have track records in interdisciplinary H2020 and SPP projects for CO2 fixation, degradation of plastics, and electrobiotechnology, as well as experience in plant physiology, biochemistry, and modeling. Due to the effects of global warming, the need for heat-absorbing insulation in buildings is expected to increase in the future. Technological advances make it possible to incorporate additional functionalities into a facade by using "smart materials" such as microalgae or cyanobacteria. The aim of this project is to design and use a facade made of microalgae or cyanobacteria that serves three different purposes at once: First, improving the thermal insulation of a building. The living façade will consist of several modules that serve as bioreactors for the growth of microalgae or cyanobacteria. It will be attached to an existing façade, shielding the building from solar radiation and improving the building's thermal insulation and appearance. Second, the microbes bind the greenhouse gas CO2 in urban areas. Unfiltered urban air is introduced to the underside of a façade panel in combination with incoming sunlight for photosynthesis by the algae, which produce biomass and oxygen that is released at the top. Therefore, the façade has the same positive effects on air quality as a tree. Third, the cyanobacteria can fix nitrogen to form fertilizer, which is increasingly important in the current energy and Russia/Ukraine crises. Accompanying the algae reactor project, concepts for plastic avoidance and energy conservation are being implemented at the Applied Microbiology/Plant Physiology Institutes. The approaches involve students in research projects evaluating photofermentations in relation to energy balance and technical performance. This application serves as a pilot project at RWTH and can be extended to the whole facade of the Sammelbau Biologie or other building areas if the evaluation is positive.

Contact: Institute of Applied Microbiology, University Professor Lars Lauterbach