Theory meets practice – We’re heading back to HTW Berlin!
The HZB’s BIPV consultancy office (BAIP) is once again coordinating and delivering the lecture series “Building-Integrated Photovoltaics”.
How can solar panels be integrated into architecture in an aesthetically pleasing and efficient way? This is precisely what our colleagues Samira Aden, Thorsten Kühn and Niklas Albinius, together with Rutger Schlatmann, will be demonstrating to Master’s students in Renewable Energy at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences during the coming summer semester.
As a BIPV consulting office, our aim is to break down barriers and disseminate knowledge. For the second time, we are shaping the summer semester with our seminar ‘Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV)’, enabling us to pass on our practical knowledge to the next generation of aspiring engineers.
Together with the students, we will delve deep into the world of solar building envelopes. In doing so, the students will work on construction project at the HZB and, in parallel with the actual planning, develop their own holistic BIPV concepts in their semester projects – ranging from technical yield simulation and building regulations checks to economic life-cycle analysis.
We are looking forward to a sunny summer semester!
- Israel Ibukun Olaniyan receives the Helmholtz Doctoral Award 2026At Helmholtz, more than 8,000 doctoral candidates conduct research. Eleven of them have now been honored for their original and outstanding work, among them Dr Israel Ibukun Olaniyan from the HZB. His doctoral thesis "Ferroelectricity at the nanoscale in epitaxial BaTiO3 on silicon" in the group of Professor Catherine Dubourdieu represents a step towards a new nanoelectronics based on topological defects, that can potentially help to create an energy efficient information technology.
- Ultrafast demagnetisation - Thinner iron, stronger effectThe thinner an iron film, the more easily it can be demagnetised by a laser pulse. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and other partners, have discovered why: the key lies in the magnetic order at the material's interfaces. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new technologies for magnetic data storage. The results have been published in the scientific journal Advanced Science.
- Blind spot for the arrangement of atomsArtificial intelligence is increasingly being used to predict the properties of new materials. A research team from Jena and the United States now shows in a study published in the journal Nature Computational Science that when language models are used for this purpose, they reliably identify which types of atoms a material contains. However, they make insufficient use of information about how those atoms are arranged in space. Neither larger models nor additional training data resolve this weakness. For material properties that depend strongly on structure, AI models specifically designed to process spatial relationships are therefore the more reliable choice. (DOI: 10.1038/s43588-026-01045-2)