Without blood, there's no life. And without healthy arteries guiding blood through the finest branching vessels down to the fingertips, our limbs and organs wouldn't get any energy. A team of experts from five Fraunhofer institutes has initiated a process for developing artificial blood vessels in the laboratory.

In the future, our streets will be quieter, with electric cars replacing gasoline and diesel engines. But, before we reach that point, there are some key issues that electromobility experts still have to address. How do you store the electricity in cars? Or what power networks do you need? And anyway, how do you pay for charging your battery?

In Dresden, at the Fraunhofer IPMS, the Institute for Photonic Microsystems, a future-oriented technology is being developed for new types of illumination and displays. The »Center for Organic Materials and Electronic Devices Dresden« in Germany, or COMEDD for short, focuses on research, development and pilot production of organic light emitting diodes.

Just because something looks tightly sealed doesn’t mean that it is! Seal a bag carefully and you might be forgiven for thinking that no air or water will escape. But in fact it doesn't take long for the bag to start leaking water vapor and oxygen – and letting them in from the outside. The solar industry also uses films to keep things tightly sealed – for example the back of solar cells . Dr. Sabine Amberg-Schwab from the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC in Würzburg and Dr. Klaus Noller from the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV in Freising have developed a new high-barrier film for solar cells.

Virtually 100 percent of the world's tobacco harvest is turned into cigarettes and similar products. But not in the German city of Aachen. Here at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology – IME for short – tobacco is a tool for promoting health rather than addiction. Dr. Stefan Schillberg, Dr. Jürgen Drossard and Dr. Thomas Rademacher use tobacco plants to produce what are known as biopharmaceuticals, generally in the form of proteins.

We have all experienced phone calls and video chats on the Internet which sound artificial, tinny and muffled compared to what we are used to from our MP3 player and television audio. "There has to be a solution," decided Manfred Lutzky, Marc Gayer and Markus Schnell, three engineers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, known as IIS for short. To transmit the audio signals in real time, the three audio experts developed new low delay audio codecs such as AAC Low Delay.

A new solar inverter was developed by Dr. Heribert Schmidt from the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg – a scientist who has spent many years trying to make inverters more efficient. The idea for the new design came to him in a flash. He suddenly saw how he could reduce inverter losses by half – increasing the yield for future solar panel operators by two percent.

In a large-scale test, an emergency situation is being rehearsed: an explosion at a former factory building. In this team exercise under real-world conditions, researchers and rescue workers are validating the key objective of the AISIS research project: an automatic structural situational awareness system for critical infrastructure. The project goal is to develop technologies that will contribute to protecting human beings as much as possible.

Biologists and engineers from four Fraunhofer institutes joined forces to create a project that is truly unique in the world: a factory for human skin.

Starting with the principle of an elephant's trunk, Festo and the Fraunhofer IPA collaborated to construct the Bionic Handling Assistant using additive production technologies. Drawing on the fundamentals of bionics, the researchers transferred natural construction principles to a robotic system, creating a unique handling system that achieves humanoid lightness of touch, dexterity, and flexibility.

To develop a material with high resistance to wear: that was the objective of a research team. For tools and components specifically subjected to load, their solution delivers an extended product lifespan with better performance characteristics.

To lower the fuel consumption of airplanes and ships, it is necessary to reduce their flow resistance, or drag. An innovative paint system makes this possible. This not only lowers costs, it also reduces CO2 emissions.