Max Planck Lecture 2026: Rocket science after all
Aircraft with two joined wings and plastic you can see through: at the Max Planck Lecture on 5 October, Peter Middendorf, Rector of the University of Stuttgart, showed what his university is working on.
Anyone who read the title closely could guess where this was going. "University of Stuttgart – no rocket science!" read the announcement, with the "no" crossed out. Aerospace is one of the University of Stuttgart's research profile areas, and it has worked in this field for decades.
The Max Planck Lecture is held once a year. This time, the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (MPI-FKF) organized it together with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS). Prof. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, Director at MPI-IS, welcomed the guest in a well-filled lecture hall 2D5 and moderated the discussion. Prof. Bernhard Keimer, Managing Director of MPI-FKF, introduced Middendorf's career.
Middendorf spoke for an hour, and not a minute of it dragged. He started with the university's history and how it is organized today, then moved on to research. From the many projects he presented, we pick two from his own field, aircraft design at the Institute of Aircraft Design (IFB).
An aircraft with two wings, one above the other, joined at the tips? That is exactly what the DOXWING project studies, led by the IFB together with Bauhaus Luftfahrt and TU Berlin. In cruise flight, this boxwing layout produces less induced drag than a conventional wing of the same span. On top of that come several electrically driven propellers, spread along the wings and powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. The propellers can increase lift, so the aircraft can take off and land on short runways. The goal is an aircraft that uses less energy and makes less noise. TU Berlin is testing the computer simulations in its wind tunnel.
The second example sounds like a contradiction at first: a material that carries loads and that you can see through. These are glass fiber-reinforced plastics. The trick is in the optics. The researchers choose a polymer that refracts light almost exactly as strongly as the glass fibers, and the panel turns transparent. In the transComp project, this approach produced transparent panels from various fibers and polymers. The IFB developed a process to make the panels without pores and built transparent molds with a very smooth surface.
In the half-hour discussion that followed, one question took center stage, and it concerns universities and research institutes alike: what should education look like in the age of artificial intelligence?
