Today's Institute of Aircraft Design and Lightweight Construction (IFL) can proudly look back on a long and eventful history and is characterised by being one of the most traditional aviation institutes in Germany.
The founding of the "Institute of Aircraft Design" dates back to 1938, when Prof. Dr. Hermann Winter (1897-1968) was appointed to the Technical University of Braunschweig and the inauguration of the Aviation Centre and thus also the Institute at Waggum Airport took place on 26 November 1938.
Prof Winter learnt to fly during the First World War and later co-founded the Akademische Fliegergruppe (Akaflieg) in Berlin. As head of the design office at Fieseler Flugzeugbau in Kassel, he was instrumental in the development of the important Fieseler Storch low-speed aeroplane. Later he designed,
built and flew the low-speed aeroplanes LF1 'Zaunkönig' and LF2 Kiebitz together with his students at the institute in the early 1940s, with teaching and research and no particular purpose in mind. The 'Zaunkönig' of the Institute of Aircraft Construction, of which a total of four examples were built between its first flight in 1940 and the 1950s and which also attracted military interest as an observation and training aircraft during the war, went down in the history books as the first motorised aircraft to be built in Germany after the Second World War with a commercial licence and type certificate in 1955. One example is now on display at the Schleißheim airfield in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, while another restored and flyable example is jointly owned by the aerospace institutes of the TU Braunschweig.
The institute was partially destroyed by the bombing of Waggum Airport during the Second World War and relocated to Bad Harzburg in 1944. After the end of the war, the Institute of Aircraft Design was renamed the ‘Institute of Machine Design and Lightweight Construction’ due to the ban on teaching in the field of aviation. Prof Winter's applied research focussed on lightweight construction methods using wood as a construction material, which also led to extensive testing equipment for strength tests. In 1952, the re-authorisation of aviation in Germany was approved and in 1955 the institute, which was now based in Braunschweig Gliesmarode, was renamed the ‘Institute of Aircraft Design and Lightweight Structures’, the name it still bears today.
With the retirement of Prof Winter, a change in leadership took place in 1960 with the election of Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Thielemann (1908-1985), who was to head the institute until 1977. Like Prof. Winter, he was also Director of the Institute of Aircraft Design at the German Aerospace Research Institute (DFL), today's German Aerospace Centre (DLR), in addition to his work at the university. His main field of research was stability theory, which meant that he steered the institute's focus more towards theoretical aspects.
In 1961, the institute moves to the new institute building at Langer Kamp 19 in Braunschweig, where it will be based for the next 40 years and can accommodate the equipment for mechanical tests on entire small aeroplanes in a large test hall.
Following the retirement of Prof. Thilemann, Prof. Dr. Horst Kossira (1931-2020) took over the management of the institute in 1978, who again took up more application-oriented questions, including tests on complete small aircraft such as the Fantrainer, the Ruschmeyer R90 or various gliders, and significantly expanded and modernised the associated testing possibilities with servo-hydraulic actuators. In addition, fibre composites have now become a widely studied subject of research, both in production and experimentation as well as in the field of numerical methods. Last but not least, the overall aircraft design in the sense of a preliminary design was developed to such an extent that an in-house programme called PrADO was created, which was trend-setting for decades and represented a flagship of the institute. Prof Kossira's book ‘Fundamentals of Lightweight Design’ established itself as a standard work in the field of lightweight design with thin-walled structures.
The celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the institute were held in 1988. Ten years later, in 1998, Prof Kossira retired from active service. In 1998, Prof Dr Peter Horst, who had previously held various management positions at the aircraft manufacturer Airbus, took over the management of the institute. In 2001, the aerospace engineering institutes moved from the central campus to the newly established research airport campus at Braunschweig Waggum Airport and the IFL moved into its new premises in Hermann-Blenk-Straße, including the new construction of a large test hall with adjoining fibre composite production laboratory and joint workshop.
Prof. Horst continued to develop the institute's research on metallic and fibre composite lightweight structures from the micro to the full-scale range in terms of stability, failure, fatigue, damage tolerance and crash, with numerical simulation and testing always going hand in hand. The expansion of the testing technology also included the construction of a unique large multiaxial cyclic testing machine for several metre-long reinforced test structures. The institute's new testing equipment was used in many research projects and by many industrial partners and supported the development and certification of many aircraft programmes, from small aircraft to the Airbus A380 programme. In 2010, he founded a branch of the IFL in Stade, the centre of fibre composite research in Germany, where the "Lower Saxony Research Cooperation for the High Performance Production of CFRP Structures" (HPCFK) was established together with colleagues from Production Engineering (IFW at Leibniz Universität Hannover) and Plastics Engineering (PuK at Clausthal University of Technology). In September 2013, TU Braunschweig made history when it achieved the Guinness World Record for the world's largest paper aeroplane with a wingspan of over 18 m under the leadership of the IFL as a joint project of employees and students, which remains unbeaten to this day (ProSieben Galileo report). As co-editor and author of the "Handbook of Aircraft Technology", Prof Horst contributed to another standard work of specialist literature on the subject.
In 2021, Prof. Horst retired and Prof. Dr. Sebastian Heimbs was appointed Professor of Aircraft Design at TU Braunschweig and took over as head of the institute. Like his predecessor, he previously held various management positions at the aviation group Airbus in the field of airframe engineering and lightweight fibre composite construction, and is continuing the application-oriented research. Two new fields of research have been established at the IFL, which expand and complement the institute's existing competence and expertise in relevant areas: As a relevant expert in the field of aircraft safety with regard to dynamic crash and impact loads, the test equipment was modernised and expanded to include short-term dynamic testing technology such as a large high-speed tearing machine and larger crash towers. In addition, a gas cannon over 12 metres long was installed for high-speed impact tests, making the IFL the only institute in Germany that can carry out bird impact tests on real aircraft structures (for animal welfare reasons, only replacement bird projectiles are used). Secondly, a new laboratory for flying technology demonstrators was established, which enables the technological innovations of the IFL and partner institutes to be evaluated in flight tests using scaled demonstrators.
Back in 2019, an independent professorship was established at the IFL for the field of "Overall Aircraft Design" with its own chair, which was initially held from 2019 to 2021 by Prof. Dr. Ali Elham, who expanded research and teaching at the institute to include topics relating to topology optimisation and machine learning. In 2023, Prof. Dr. Ingo Staack was appointed to this professorship, establishing his long-standing research focus on systems engineering (MBSE and SoS) from his previous work at Linköping University in Sweden in research and teaching at the IFL.
With this competent management team and the consistent expansion of the historically grown research topics to include important current topics, the institute is ideally positioned for the future to fulfil its role as one of the most traditional institutes in aviation and to continue to make important contributions to the development of eco-efficient and safe aircraft construction methods and structures of tomorrow.
Institute of Aircraft Design and Lightweight Structures
Hermann-Blenk-Straße 35
D-38108 Braunschweig
E-Mail: ifl@tu-braunschweig.de
Telephone: +49 531 391 9903