Projects and References

As part of the funding initiative “Resource-Efficient Circular Economy – Urban Mining” launched by the German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), the research project “RueBe” was initiated in November 2025. The project aims to recover and reintegrate mineral waste from DK0 landfills into sustainable building material cycles. It is coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBP.

Climate adaptation and biodiversity protection need to be more closely interconnected and developed through integrated approaches. For planning processes, this means combining climatic and ecological information, databases, climate adaptation and biodiversity strategies, as well as interdisciplinary expertise - a major challenge, particularly as no digitally supported methodology for the integrated planning of climate adaptation and biodiversity protection currently exists. As a result, planning processes are often complex and time-consuming, while potential synergies remain difficult to identify. The BioAdapt project addresses this challenge by developing a user-friendly planning tool that integrates data and methodologies for the evidence-based design and evaluation of climate adaptation and biodiversity protection measures, including the necessary databases.

The construction industry is facing a major challenge: each year, around 90 percent of all domestic mineral raw materials used in Germany are consumed by construction projects. At the same time, many valuable construction wastes - particularly from older buildings - are landfilled or insufficiently recycled. Structures built between the 1960s and 1980s are especially affected, as they often contain fibrous silicate minerals. These legacy contaminations frequently result in otherwise recyclable concrete having to be disposed of as hazardous waste. The ReAsCon project therefore pursues an innovative approach for processing and recovering such unwanted legacy materials in the construction sector.

Since 2013, the new urban district Neckarpark has been developed on the site of the former freight yard brownfield in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt. Municipal wastewater serves as the primary energy source for the district heat supply. Its thermal energy is harnessed via a heat pump system and distributed through a low-temperature district heating network. To increase the efficiency of the district heating network, developers were required from the outset to significantly exceed the statutory energy performance requirements for new buildings (minimum standard: KfW Efficiency House 55). At the launch of the project and for several years thereafter, the Neckarpark project - with a thermal extraction capacity of 2,100 kW from wastewater - was by far the largest wastewater heat recovery project in Germany. As such, Neckarpark serves as a nationwide benchmark for sustainable energy supply in urban districts.

The SafeCar project aimed to reduce the risk of infection for paramedics and patients in ambulances by finding ways of eliminating viruses in a swift and efficient manner.

In the “Fraunhofer vs. Corona” program, Fraunhofer IBP has established practical methods to demonstrate the efficiency of air purification technologies.

Mobile indoor air purifiers remove infectious aerosols from the air or deactivate the pathogens contained within.

Scientists at the Fraunhofer IBP are developing an online process analysis to detect and verify organosulfur compounds.

New regulations such as the Energy Saving Ordinance raise the question of how efficiently ventilation systems work in terms of energy consumption.

The Fraunhofer IBP helped PHIUS develop a climate-adapted passive house standard and implemented it in the building simulation software WUFI® Passive.