The Houska Award is the largest private award for applied research in Austria, with a total annual prize money of 500.000€, donated by the B&C Foundation. In 2019, two Cluster members from TU Vienna, together with their teams, each won one of the prestigious awards.
Cubicure GmbH, with Jürgen Stampfl as Chief Scientific Officer, made second place in the category “Research and Development in SME”. With their Hot Lithography technology, the company developed the key to lead plastic 3D printing beyond prototypes and utility models to the industrial production of technical or medical components. At the heart of the technology is a patented heating and coating mechanism that can process technically relevant plastics with extreme precision. The main fields of application are expected to be aerospace, mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering. Further research in the fields of sustainability and biocompatibility is on its way.
DISRUPT 3D, a project under the lead of Aleks Ovsianikov, won the audience award in the category „University Research“. Ovsianikov’s team from the Institute of Materials Science and Technology at TU Vienna succeeded in developing an innovative 3D printing process that enables the production of microcomponents with highest resolution at economic costs per unit. Compared to other established printing methods, the resolution has been increased by a factor of 1,000, making it possible to produce models a cubic micron in size. This method is particularly suitable for electronic, micromechanical and optical components, but also for biological applications, for. B. natural cell environments can replicate. The discovery was the basis for the founding of the spin-off company UpNano.