Back to the roots

LiGenium

Is it impossible to use wood in mechanical engineering today? The LiGenium team has been proving the opposite for three years. The start-up uses wood to produce workpiece carriers and transport trolleys, for example, which are durable and offer nothing but advantages. LiGenium is unique with its sustainable concept. In the Macher der Woche interview, Managing Director Christoph Alt explains why wood is the best solution for the future of mechanical engineering and why LiGenium is already way ahead of the competition.

For those who don't know LiGenium yet: How would you describe your work?
Christoph Alt: Under the umbrella term "wood in mechanical engineering", we manufacture wooden products that primarily help companies to simplify their logistics. Among other things, we build conveyor systems and load carriers for internal transport routes. In doing so, we utilise the expertise we have built up over many years of research into wood as a material and apply this to mechanical engineering.

For example, if a company needs a transport trolley for certain components so that they can transport them within the factory, do you develop a customised product based on this?
Exactly, that's the classic approach. At the moment, we mainly manufacture systems specifically for the automotive industry. Thanks to our pluggable system - I always call it our "Lego kit" - we are very flexible and can quickly find solutions for our customers from the parts we have already designed. You can imagine our "Lego kit" like this: It consists of wooden panels and new parts are created from them depending on how I work with them. However, all the parts are equipped with the same plug-in system, so they can be combined with each other as required. This gives us an incredible variety of components that we can put together individually for the customer. These wooden panels give us freedom of design and are still easy to work with. This is very difficult with other materials: steel, for example, cannot be processed in such a way that a plug-in connection can even be realised. Our material is finished. Ideally, I don't even have to rework the parts by hand when they "fall" out of the machine, I just plug them together.

LiGenium's pluggable system also offers the advantage that the load carrier can be converted quickly and easily afterwards without having to take it apart completely. For example, if a customer needs to replace a component for their vehicle model because they later purchase it from another supplier, LiGenium can produce an overlay for the new part and replace it in the load carrier.

Who is part of the LiGenium team?
We are three founders and one female founder. Our founder Angela Grimmer already had ten years of professional experience in business management in industry before she founded LiGenium with us. The three scientific founders are Dr Ronny Eckhardt, Dr Sven Eichhorn and myself. In the meantime, our team has grown by six employees.

You can already look back on more than ten years of experience with wood as a material. How did you get here?
My childhood dream was to become a carpenter. I'm not that far away now: I didn't give up my dream of being a craftsman, but instead looked at how I could find it again in the academic field. Mechanical engineering was an obvious choice. I really like the creation process: making something out of nothing. When I finished my degree, there was an offer at Chemnitz University of Technology in the field of renewable raw materials in mechanical engineering, which interested me. While working at the TU, I got to know my colleagues Dr Sven Eichhorn and Dr Ronny Eckhardt. I worked with them for a long time researching the topic of wood in mechanical engineering. However, my goal was always to become self-employed and I wanted to do something that nobody else was doing. That's why we decided to apply for an Exist research transfer programme. This is a grant that allows you to set up a company from within a university. After a very complex application phase, we were granted this funding. Being selected for this is one of the highest honours. We were then able to use the funding to prepare our start-up at Chemnitz University of Technology and begin our first projects with major car manufacturers.

This transition phase, in which you spun off from the TU and continued your research at the same time, was in 2018. How was that possible?
Exist funding requires a spin-off at the end of the funding phase. However, in the time leading up to the application, we had already learnt that if you want to place something on the market or at least generate interest, you need a GmbH. That's why we wanted to set up a little earlier. At the same time, our university affiliation also allows us to work part-time. In other words, we continued our research as our main occupation and at the same time started to build up our company and fulfil our first orders.

Is it difficult to convince companies to switch to your products?
Not so much any more. Word is getting around, especially among the major car manufacturers. We regularly receive new projects from the companies that we already count among our customers - for a new vehicle model or a special application, for example. Thanks to our component customisation, companies can come up with logistics concepts that cannot be realised with standard metal load carriers.

What are the advantages of wood as a material?
The sustainability that can be achieved with wood is unique. Wood is a renewable raw material. If it is sustainably harvested, it is infinitely available and with little energy it becomes the material we use. We use plywood, which consists of almost 95 per cent wood, with the remaining five per cent being adhesive.
Another advantage is that wood is relatively cheap. This is an economic advantage: if I know how to use it, process it and manufacture the product, wood is quite cheap compared to conventional construction methods. Wood also has an advantage when it comes to signal attenuation, i.e. for radio and WLAN signals. Steel shields such signals. Nowadays, everything has to be verifiable at all times: So I need to know where a particular component is at any given time. Too much metal in close proximity means that the radio and WLAN signals are "swallowed up", so to speak. So if all the load carriers in a factory are made of steel, the signals won't reach them. This does not happen with wood.

But that is by no means the end of the list of advantages that Christoph Alt can list in favour of his material: thanks to their lightweight construction, wooden load carriers weigh only around half as much as comparable load carriers made of steel. This means that workers have to exert much less force to move them around the factory, which is good for their health. LiGenium also adjusts the access heights and depths so that employees can remove the components more easily. Another advantage of the wooden load carriers is that they are quieter: They rattle less than their metal counterparts. "This is the vibration and noise damping effect of wood as a material," explains Christoph Alt. "We spoke to order pickers and the assembly teams on the line and they said that our products are also warm and therefore feel good. These are advantages that we didn't realise before, but which also play an important role. Does this perhaps make employees want to work with it more than with a steel product or do they feel supported because it is not so heavy? We still need to find out." In the future, LiGenium would like to collaborate with an industrial psychology professorship to have these aspects assessed.

What criteria do you use to select the wood for your production?
We make sure that we use materials that are grown sustainably. It is also important that the materials are suitable for our applications. The wood itself is usually Eastern European or Scandinavian. The birch plywood that we primarily use must be birch, which grows relatively slowly and is therefore more likely to be found in colder regions of the world. We also use German beech plywood. Beech has a few disadvantages, for example it swells a lot, which is why we only use it for applications where we can use so-called synthetic resin moulded wood. In these plywoods, the wood is pressed twice as hard. This gives the material extremely high mechanical properties - comparable to poor structural steel - but with a fifth of the density. We attach great importance to the fact that the wood for our products comes from sustainably managed forests. To this end, we ensure in advance that the suppliers can provide the relevant certificates.

What impact has the pandemic had on LiGenium?
In purely business terms, it has had no negative impact. Our customers - the people responsible for logistics in the companies - had time to think about sustainability during the first lockdown. As a result, we received many orders during the lockdown phase that might otherwise have been further in the future. That gave us a real boost last year in March and April, which is still resonating today. We don't need to talk about the hardships that we have to cope with privately - the whole population is feeling the same. But of course it's incredibly difficult when you have a family and are building a start-up. It was and still is draining.

If you continue to grow, do you still want to stay in Chemnitz?
I think the city deserves a "lighthouse" and we want to be one. I think Chemnitz and LiGenium are a good combination. On the one hand, you have the cradle of mechanical engineering here, automotive history is not far away and on the other, you have Hans Carl von Carlowitz's idea of sustainability. These are precisely the three topics that we combine at LiGenium. And from a purely historical point of view, it would be nonsense for us to leave here. We are definitely planning to keep our headquarters here in Chemnitz. If it turns out that we need to be closer to a car manufacturer due to the short distances, then there will certainly be a few outposts in production, but the "brains" will be here in Chemnitz.

The list of awards that LiGenium has already won is long. Last year, for example, you were awarded joint 3rd place in the Saxon Founder's Prize. How does that feel?
It feels affirming that we have won such prizes with the topic of wood in mechanical engineering, which is absolutely obvious to us but difficult to understand for the general public. They motivate us to continue. We were very pleased to be ranked 10th among start-ups in Germany in 2020. It always takes a little while to achieve a certain level of recognition in the start-up environment and thus have the opportunity to find customers who need the product and also want to buy it.

What do you want for LiGenium in the future?
We can either continue to grow or pursue the vision of establishing wood in mechanical engineering across the board. However, the latter will only work if other institutions and companies are also fuelling the topic. And that takes time. We definitely want to be the competitor that is the most sustainable compared to all other mechanical engineering companies and also brings the most sustainable products to the market. And we want to leave as little of an ecological footprint as possible.

What do you want for Chemnitz in the run-up to the Capital of Culture year 2025?
It is very good that we have won the title. I was a strong supporter of the bid right from the start. I can imagine that over the next four years, many more people will join us and make something good out of it. What I would like to see is that it becomes a team effort. That everyone who can contribute something doesn't just do it for their own convictions, their own area, their own institution, but that it becomes something communal. If you internalise that, then the Capital of Culture year will be sustainable for the region.