Up to 300 individual fibre strands – bundles of individual fibres – have to be monitored simultaneously during production. If carbon fibres tear, it costs time and money to sort out the damaged fibres. This is just one example of various defects that can occur in the fibres during production.

Therefore, young engineer Deniz Sinan Yesilyurt attached a camera to the carbon fibre line that takes pictures of various fibre defects during production and collects them in a database. The artificial intelligence (AI) in the camera’s information technology system evaluates the fibre defects by assigning the images to predefined reference defects. In doing so, it recognises various fibre defects with a classification accuracy of 99%. The process developed by Mr Yesilyurt can also be used in other areas that produce chemical fibres.

For this idea, the Deniz Sinan Yesilyurt received the second prize of the “Digitalisation in Mechanical Engineering” Young Talent Award on 6 December 2022. Deniz Sinan Yesilyurt received the prize from the German Engineering Federation (VDMA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is a Bachelor’s graduate at the Institut für Textiltechnik (ITA) of RWTH Aachen University. The full title of his bachelor’s thesis is: “Development of a Kl-supported process monitoring using machine learning to detect fibre damage in the stabilisation process”.