Main objective of the ICTM is to maintain a long-term partnership between industry and R&D institutions with focus on turbomachinery manufacturing. Its main activities are:
To enable collaborative R&D approaches, ICTM operates an R&D network platform with an individual governance and management structure: The ICTM Partner Community. Its collaborative R&D activities are financed by annual budget contribution from each the industry partners. This concept allows to join forces, speed-up innovations, connect experts and provide excellent R&D.
The strategic target of the ICTM is to continuously extend the ICTM Partner Community. Particularly it addresses manufacturer of turbomachinery, supplier, and technology provider, all of them in the range from large and global to small and medium enterprises (SME). This is to keep a close relationship and to enable a growth of the collaborative R&D volume.
The strategic research areas of the ICTM with regard to collaborative R&D are:
Both is addressed, specific technology improvement for individual manufacturing processes, as well as comprehensive improvement of the entire manufacturing chain.
The ICTM Roadmap for collaborative R&D has been set-up and agreed in 2016. According to the strategy, it covers a mid-term range and will be extended continuously to derive an annual set of collaborative R&D projects. As it is proprietary information to the ICTM, it cannot be disclosed to public in detail. Based on this roadmap, the projects for the collaborative R&D have been derived for the current year and will be in future.
To complement the annual selection of collaborative R&D projects according to its roadmap the ICTM continuously screens funding opportunities that allow to address strategic topics, which could not be included because of limited collaborative annual budget. To stay independent and without constraints result of the internationality of the Partner Community, the ICTM is able to set-up sub-consortia in addition to the Partner Community with regards to particular funding projects.
ICTM Aachen – International Center for Turbomachinery Manufacturing