Innovative thinking in construction: Svenja Göbel receives award for her Master's thesis

Our colleague Ms. Svenja Göbel received the second prize in the civil engineering category for her outstanding Master's thesis within the framework of the promotion prize of the Association of Building Trade Entrepreneurs Hesse e.V. (VbU).

Vice President VbU Dr.-Ing. Hans-Hartwig Loewenstein announced during the ceremony that the introduction of this award "[...] has set the goal to support students who advance innovative building in their respective final theses with a financial incentive and to introduce them to practice".

In her final thesis entitled "Supporting structures made of carbon fiber-plastic composites in the construction industry", Ms. Göbel examines the exclusive use of carbon fiber-reinforced plastics for supporting frameworks. Up to now, the use of CFRP has been limited to the reinforcement of armoured concrete components or the use in textile concrete. For her research, she manufactured LBF flexible supporting beams from carbon fiber-reinforced plastic at the Fraunhofer Institute for structural durability and system reliability ,and tested them in the building materials laboratory at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences.

In addition, she has submitted her thesis, together with her supervising professor, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Regina Stratmann-Albert, for the Innovation Award Construction Technology of the German Concrete and Construction Technology Association (Deutscher Beton- und Bautechnik-Verein e.V.). (DBV) and was then nominated to give a lecture at the German Construction Technology Day 2019 in Stuttgart.

We wish Ms. Göbel every success for this project and congratulate her on this extraordinary achievement.