Due to the increasing demand for high-performance cells for mobile applications, the standards of the performance of active materials and the efficiency of cell production strategies are rising. One promising cell technology to fulfill the increasing requirements for actual and future applications are all solid-state batteries with pure lithium metal on the anode side. The outstanding electrochemical material advantages of lithium, with its high theoretical capacity of 3860 mAh/g and low density of 0.534 g/cm³, can only be taken advantage of in all solid-state batteries, since, in conventional liquid electrochemical systems, the lithium dissolves with each discharging cycle. Apart from the current low stability of all solid-state separators, challenges lie in the general processing, as well as the handling and separation, of lithium metal foils. Unfortunately, lithium metal anodes cannot be separated by conventional die cutting processes in large quantities. Due to its adhesive properties and toughness, mechanical cutting tools require intensive cleaning after each cut. The presented experiments show that remote laser cutting, as a contactless and wear-free method, has the potential to separate anodes in large numbers with high-quality cutting edges.

Objective: The role of environmental factors in hospitalization of patients with schizophrenia is incompletely understood. This study attempts to relate the pattern of hospital admissions to environmental variables such as season and to social factors such as nationally celebrated holidays.

To use the full potential of composite parts, e.g., to reduce the structural weight of cars or airplanes, a greater focus is needed on the joining technology. Adhesive bonding is considered favorable, superior joining technology for these parts. Unfortunately, to provide a structural and durable bond, a surface pre-treatment is necessary. Due to its high integration potential in industrial process chains, laser radiation can be a very efficient tool for this purpose. Within the BMBF-funded (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) project GEWOL, a laser source that emits radiation at 3 µm wavelength (which shows significant advantages in theory) was developed for a sensitive laser-based bonding pre-treatment. Within the presented study, the developed laser source was compared with conventional laser sources emitting radiation at 355 nm, 1064 nm, and 10,600 nm in terms of application for a composite bonding pre-treatment. With the different laser sources, composites were treated, analytically tested, subsequently bonded, and mechanically tested to determine the bonding ability of the treated specimens. The results show a sensitive treatment of the surface with the developed laser source, which resulted in a very effective cleaning, high bonding strengths (over 32 MPa), and a good effectiveness compared with the conventional laser sources.

Due to the intention to increase the product efficiency by weight reduction, the application of carbon fiber reinforced plastics and its processing becomes more and more important for the industrial production planning. The aviation industry mostly uses epoxy-based preimpregnated laminates (prepregs). These prepregs are stored in the refrigerated state and may be processed after defrosting only for a specific shelf-life or so-called out-time. This limitation in processing time reduces the efficiency of the entire production, for example due to the waste of material during production stops. To improve the production effectiveness the shelf-life should be as high as possible, to be able to avoid material waste during production stops. Therefore, the processability and the postcure mechanical properties of two representative prepregs were investigated during this study for different aging stages and correlated with the reactivity of the prepregs.

Focusing the adhesive bonding of thermoset carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRPs) due to release agent residues on a surface pretreatment prior to the bonding process is inevitable to guarantee sufficient adhesion. Based on different material and process-related phenomena, a huge variety of parameters (e.g. treatment time) influence the treatment effectiveness. This often leads to intense parameter studies in which pretreatment methods are qualified by different mechanical tests and which require significant effort in terms of time and resources. Those qualification procedures are sometimes standardized by different and mostly company-specific standards. To increase the efficiency of this qualification process by increasing the general validity, this paper presents a comparison of different mechanical test methods (namely single lap shear test, floating roller peel test, double cantilever beam (DCB) test, and cross-tension test) in terms of their sensitivity to the detection of adhesion or delamination defects, even if they normally test different aspects of a joint. However, it could be found that the most common test – the single lap shear test – can only reveal large defect levels, while different tests, e.g. DCB test, show a good sensitivity for all investigated failures and others show intermediate performance.