With the appointment of Dr.-Ing. Samuel SCHABEL as professor and head of the department in 2002, neither a mechanical engineer nor a paper engineer was selected for the first time. Nevertheless, the Appointments Committee remained true to its line and, after Prof. Brecht and Prof. Göttsching, chose Prof. Schabel as the new head of the institute, who was still very young at 37 at the time of taking office. What the current head of the department has in common with Prof. Pfarr is that his last employer was Voith, although not in Heidenheim, but in Ravensburg. With the new appointment, the Institute for Paper Manufacturing was renamed, which had long since been known within the university as the Paper Manufacturing Department, but now officially bears the name Paper Manufacturing and Mechanical Process Engineering. This is intended to strengthen the process engineering orientation of the department.
Prof. Schabel is also the scientific director of the non-profit institution for Paper Science and Technology – IfP-GmbH, which was founded in 2001. The shareholders of IfP-GmbH are two thirds VDP and one third TU Darmstadt. There is a cooperation agreement between the TU Darmstadt and the IfP-GmbH for mutual support in education and research. The IfP-GmbH served the purpose of keeping long-standing employees employed under Prof. Göttsching in the specialist area and thus not suffering any loss of know-how. Meanwhile, IfP-GmbH is structured in such a way that it mainly provides services within the scope of research contracts and also offers them to third parties, while the scientific activity in the research projects is performed by employees of TU Darmstadt.
100 years of IfP
In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the institute, preparations for the thorough renovation of the department were made immediately after the appointment of Prof. Schabel and with the financial support of KORA and the Gertrud und Hellmut Barthel-Stiftung / Varel. This was accompanied by the dismantling and transport of the test paper machine, calender, slitter rewinder and cross cutter, which were taken over from the industrial museum in Trebsen and are to be reinstalled in working order. As the paper machine could no longer be operated for several years anyway due to the lack of heating steam – the TH's own power plant was first privatised and then shut down – the separation was not difficult. This made it possible to create space to relocate the electrical workshop and the workshop warehouse, to set up a new hall for test stands and to modernise and simultaneously enlarge the stock preparation pilot plant (Fig. 11). The latter was re-equipped with the old machines, but received new drives and is equipped with a modern process control system. The stock preparation pilot plant can be used both for research purposes and for modern student training.
In addition to various new measuring and testing devices, a new laboratory refiner from Voith should also be mentioned, which was commissioned in 2005 with various grinding sets for operation as disc refiners and optionally also cone refiners. The laboratory refiner is controlled by a computer and permits the grinding and fully automatic sampling of different fibers under defined conditions of different grinding theories (e.g. under specification of the specific edge load and the pure specific grinding work). The old grinding shop was also modernised, in which a new electric hot water treatment system was installed as part of a current research project to investigate the grinding quality of various wood storage variants. In addition, almost all the rooms in the department have been renovated in recent years, mainly through generous donations, and today make the institute appear bright, friendly and equipped with modern equipment.
