Two graduates of the Master's degree programme in Textile Products at the Hochschule Niederrhein had two reasons to celebrate: together with their former fellow students from the Faculty of Textile and Clothing Technology, they not only celebrated their degrees, but also received a very special distinction: they each received 1500 euros in prize money for their outstanding theses.
The Textile and Fashion Network (TFN, the faculty's support association) supports Franziska Guth, while the other 1500 euros were donated to Tabea Hofemeister by the Association of the Rhenish Textile and Clothing Industry.
Franziska Guth, who won the prize, wrote her thesis in conjunction with the KARL MAYER GROUP, a textile machinery manufacturer headquartered in Obertshausen in the German state of Hesse. In it, she looked at the strategic challenges of smart textiles.
Franziska Guth developed a warp-knitted (knitted fabric consisting of several vertically running threads) Smart Textile Demonstrator. Specifically, it is a non-contact motion sensor for gesture recognition made of a spacer fabric with conductive yarn that can be used as a control tool for various applications such as automotive interiors. It was already presented at Techtextil in Frankfurt in 2022.
With her innovative approach and her specially designed sensor, she made an important contribution to the development of smart textiles on warp knitting machines. Guth now works at the KARL MAYER GROUP as a textile product developer, where she continues to work on innovative textile structures that can be produced on warp knitting machines. She plans to use the prize money to catch up on her travel plans, which were cancelled due to Corona. "Ideally, I would like to go back to Asia, for example, backpacking in Vietnam."
The goal of Tabea Hofemeister's master's thesis was to introduce methods to test the chemical-tightness of personal protective equipment. Until now, these had been missing from the inventory of the Public Testing Laboratory for Textiles at the Hochschule Niederrhein.
With the help of the abrasion test, it checked whether liquid enters the material or is prevented from doing so. Secondly, she examined how resistant the protective clothing is to the penetration of chemicals in the spray test.
Based on technical requirements, she identified various options for a test equipment design and introduced it to the existing quality management system.
Hofemeister, who lived in Mönchengladbach among other places during her university career, is currently a doctoral candidate in vehicle safety at Volkswagen in Wolfsburg. She would like to invest the 1,500 euros.
