Mid-Term Workshop of the interdisciplinary "DLR Graduate School GANDALF"
- DLR Graduate School GANDALF: Awareness and Fighting of Pandemic Threats
- Solutions to contain future pandemics and their impact on the transport sector
- Interdisciplinary collaboration of doctoral students from various DLR institutes
The "DLR Graduate School GANDALF: Awareness and Fighting of Pandemic Threats" develops solutions for mitigating future pandemics and their effects on the transport sector in close interdisciplinary collaboration between doctoral students from various DLR institutes (Aerodynamics and Flow Technology, Vehicle Concepts, Aerospace Medicine, Software Technology, System Architectures in Aviation and Technical Physics). In addition to the individual specialized doctorates, an important pillar of the "GANDALF idea" is the interdisciplinary exchange with each other, with other partners at DLR and with other research institutions and industry partners. As part of a two-day workshop on 26 and 27 October at the :envihab of the DLR Institute of Aerospace Medicine in Cologne, the results to date were presented to partners from science (including TUM, HZDR, Bonn University Hospital, USN Norway) and industry (including Airbus, DB Systemtechnik, Lufthansa) and future tasks were considered. With the participation of Klaus Hamacher and representatives of several DLR program directorates, the topic of the corona pandemic and the impact of possible future pandemics on the transport sector was discussed over two days with a total of 70 participants in the context of external and internal specialist lectures, intensive poster presentations and a comprehensive panel discussion. Special thanks go to Mr. Klaus from Lufthansa and Ms. Boschert from the University Hospital of Cologne for their keynote and impulse speeches on the topics of "Pandemic plan in aviation / cleaning and hygiene in passenger aircraft" and "Multi-resistant germs as a potential future pandemic". Another special highlight was the poster presentation of the doctoral students' results in a city bus. Using thermal human models, an air sampler and personal microbial sampling, the detection of microorganisms in public transport was demonstrated and use cases for measures such as improved risk assessment models, antimicrobial surfaces, air curtains or high-temperature decontamination of the circulating air were presented in an application-oriented manner.
In addition to the purely technical discussions, other points such as the exchange of knowledge and data, challenges in research projects and many opportunities for further collaboration as well as previous "lessons learnt" were also discussed. The Graduate School GANDALF would like to thank all participants from academia and industry for the intensive professional exchange and support. The unanimously positive feedback and the high level of interest shown by all participants motivate us to continue our intensive research and to strive for follow-up workshops in the future - as a concrete example, more intensive networking with the CORAERO project is already being planned as part of a meeting of the more than 20 doctoral students involved in both projects.