GRK 3068:  Climate-informed Engineering

• Subject Area: Process Engineering, Technical Chemistry ; Water Research
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 531249004

Breakthroughs in computing have led to the development of new generations of Earth Systems Models, which provide detailed information on how our planet may locally respond to the ongoing global warming, with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions of 1 km and a few minutes, respectively. This massive climate data may be of little value, if not utilized by engineers who are involved in developing technical solutions for real-world challenges. Engineers stand to benefit from seizing this opportunity and by incorporating climate data in engineering designs, solutions, and practices. This benefit is precisely the key driving force for founding the Research Training Group (RTG) on Climate-informed Engineering (CIE) as an emerging interdisciplinary field of research integrating state-of-the-art climate information with engineering education. A structured training strategy is designed in the RTG featuring a broad range of educational activities to facilitate training and promote early-career researchers who will contribute to developing the next generation of engineering solutions that are adaptive to climate. In doing so, we will integrate a new generation of climate models in our training through the active involvement of the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), an internationally renowned organization at the forefront of global efforts on climate models. Furthermore, the RTG offers a joint PhD program between TUHH and the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). Hence, the PhD candidates will benefit from the interactions with renowned experts at UNU and the UN on a variety of topics related to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which is at the heart of our RTG. The RTG will utilize engineering science and innovative approaches to develop new materials, processes, and predictive capabilities to help people, businesses, and ecosystem in the face of climate change. The RTG will include three main Research Areas, namely CIE for Built Environment, CIE for Process Engineering and CIE for Sustainable Resource Management and Environment. Ten projects are designed in the first funding phase, covering a wide range of topics, spanning from influence of climate on renewable resources and food engineering to developing novel materials for latent heat storage. The projects will couple indoor and outdoor climates based on Internet-of-Things technologies and will develop predictive capabilities for water and food security. All the principal investigators and PhD candidates share the common goal of employing new-generation climate information to devise strategies for mitigating climate change. This interdisciplinary RTG is the first of its kind, ultimately enabling engineers to build infrastructure and to develop new materials and processes that are informed by the climate data, which will be an increasingly important dimension of engineering education in the 21st century.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Technische Universität Hamburg
• Participating Institution: Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie (MPI-M)
• Spokesperson: Professor Nima Shokri
• Participating Researchers: Professor Dr.-Ing. Peter Fröhle; Professor Dr.-Ing. Stefan Heinrich; Dr. Cathy Hohenegger; Professor Dr. Patrick Huber; Professor Dr. Andreas Liese; Professor Dr.-Ing. Thomas Rung; Professor Dr.-Ing. Marcus Rutner; Professor Dr.-Ing. Michael Schlüter; Professor Dr.-Ing. Kay Smarsly; Professorin Dr.-Ing. Irina Smirnova; Professor Dr. Bjorn B. Stevens