#1 From DJ Booth to Hydrogen Lab – Juergen Rechberger on Belief, Agility, and Simulation Shaping the Future

Welcome to the AVL simulation podcast where engineering missions take off. Join us as we navigate the evolving universe of digital engineering and simulation in the automotive and energy industries. Explore the forces shaping the AVL simulation software suite and hear how pioneers across the globe use it to outpace competition. "Strappin, our mission begins now. Welcome your host to today's episode." What happens when engineering ambition meets global energy challenge? I'm Max Oma and in today's episode we explore how simulation is driving progress into hydrogen and industrial energy. My guest is Jürgen Rechberger, vice president at AVL and part of the strategic leadership of the company's push into sustainable energy systems, from hydrogen and propulsion to next generation electrolyzers. We'll talk about building agile teams, developing digital twins and why simulation is essential to accelerating clean energy solutions. Buckle up, this one is about scale, speed and sustainability. We think about AVL as a technology universe. Jürgen Rechberger, where are you located in this universe? So thanks for the invitation first to be the first one, right? That's always nice to be. Regarding the AVL universe, my central focus point is energy. AVL has a little bit of diversification strategy, because as we all know, automotive is a little bit difficult. We are since years working on very strategically on diversification. One of the main areas we want to go to is energy technologies. That's my focus area. I have a few other roles still around that. That's still everything regarding hydrogen mobility. Then one focus area is aviation. Another one is rail and another one is marine. Aviation. Tell us more about that. Aviation is super exciting because even in my background, when I was 14, I was 5 years in innovation school. It's really a lot of fun going back into that. Aviation is one of these hard to obey sectors. It's not so easy to decarbonize aviation. Therefore, there are different solutions to this cost. One, for example, is just keeping the technologies but switching the fuel to sustainable fuels. That's something we are very active in processes how to generate these fuels. The second topic, even exciting, is hydrogen airplanes running on a full electric propulsion system with fuel cells. Also, that we are very active. It's in the public domain that we are working with air force on that to develop megawatt scale fuels and main propulsion systems for passenger planes. That's really exciting. Super. Now we know where you are located but what do you actually do all day at AVL? In theory, what I should do is we have about two years ago created a dedicated global business segment with all these topics I have said before. It's called hydrogen industrial energy. I am basically running this global business segment. So pushing forward our business. I would say that the main stakeholder for all these different areas to keep everything together, follow our strategy, develop our strategy and grow this business for AVL. Cool. If you had to give your role and nickname, what would it be? I would say that would be a missed sustainability because I have a coming from my background. Very strong focus on sustainability. My business is, I would say, 100% ESG SDG business. But I am convinced that we need to work on sustainability. That's really my driving force. Great. Talking about your background a little bit more, what got you into engineering in the first place? Actually, in the first place I did it in any case, something else. But it's a long history. But I started actually, as I said, five years in a school for aviation and I went to Vienna in the university for engineering. But in parallel, it actually was very much into the music industry. So I was starting in Vienna to be a DJ. I was actually more in clubs than in the university. And then I stopped the university even for one and a half years when to New York as a professional DJ. That was fun. But I figured out that it's probably not the helliest way of life. So I had to stop that. There were too much influences around. So I went back to university, finished the study. And then I got an offer for McKinsey. So I was working then two years for McKinsey. Went to Los Angeles. And there actually was really Los Angeles was a very interesting period at this time because all this emission came up, zero emission vehicles. CO2 was not a big topic that's 20 years ago, but at least the zero emission was a very big topic. And then I started really to get interested and excited about that. But at McKinsey, I learned from me that I cannot have the impact I wanted to have. It's more consulting, it's boundary conditions, it's business cases. So I thought I will have a bigger impact on sustainability in an engineering technology company. And that's how I came to AVL. Awesome. So technology and engineering with bigger impact in your point of view. When people gather around you, what do you think is your gravity? What do people come to you for? Probably that's a few points, but for one choice, my drive and my spirit for sustainability, for innovation. But still I'm not a research guy. Research guys are usually we shouldn't say that, but a little bit of nerds. I think I'm not that. I'm considering innovation, but how we can make a business out of it. Because we can only bring these new fancy technologies into the market to help us on sustainability when they are to some extent a business case. And I think I'm pretty good in bringing all these most important topics together, right, innovation, sustainability, but then making also a business a case out of it. You have mentioned the terms sustainability already several times. What is the deeper meaning for yourself when you say sustainability? I'm in one for me, sustainability has different elements and different levels. One is pretty obvious that we need to do something against climate change. I see this as the biggest threat mankind is facing. So we need to do something against it. But for sustainability for me is much more than that. For example, even in relationships, right, you should tend privately to have sustainable relationships. We need on the business side sustainable relationships. So I see it really as a broad thing, not only related the environment. Going back to your everyday work life, give us a tool that makes your day 10 times more productive. That's an easy answer here. That's coffee in the morning. That's the most important thing. Otherwise nothing would work. And that's really a need to have that. Otherwise I cannot even go into the first meeting. So besides coffee, is there something that you will tell our audience you might suggest somebody else in your industry as well to do as a habit as a daily routine maybe. And one thing for me, which I really need to have is really staying up to date. I have a brain which needs to be occupied 24/7. So my brain basically never rests. So I will always need to confront it with what's going on. So I read I spend time on social media. I read a lot of stuff all the time. And it's not only into my area. I want to go, I want to understand what's going on in politics and economics. And that's really important for me. So when you say your brain never really turns off, you might also have a trick or a habit that makes your brain rest and get at ease at some points. Yeah, for sure. That's still, I was a DJ, right? So music is still super important for me. I'm learning languages for relaxation. It just might sound a little bit strange. But I'm learning now since two years Japanese. It's really, it's a lot of fun. I really like it, but music is more for the relaxing phase. And in my job, it brings, I'm traveling about 60% of the year, right? I have a lot of travel time. And I usually fill that up with music. Sweet. Now, hard change. Big curve in our discussion. Let's move into simulation, virtualization and digitalization. What role does simulation play in your area? Yeah, super important one, right? So I can today not even imagine to develop a product without simulation. So it's, it's core of what we do. And for me, really, it is mostly, I would say, if I should choose one of the main drivers, I see development speed. Right? So that's for me, the key that we can push the technology, we can push designs prototypes in in the virtual world first because before we even touch hardware. So that's really the key I think, but it's such a natural thing to do. I cannot even imagine to do a developer product without it. When thinking about the energy sector, one of the most important topics are electrolyzers. What opportunities and horizons do you see for simulation in the development of electrolyzers? Yeah, quite a lot of actually. So electrolyzers today would say are still at the average maturity level. There are still a lot of things to be improved. Because so far this market was very small. There was not put too much effort in the development of really high-quality mature products. And we are now addressing that in our usual way of working, applying a lot of simulation in that. I think where we are pretty good with electrolyzers is already on the whole performance simulation. I think that's more or less solved. But I think there's a lot of potential to extend this capability more into prediction. So we need here a prediction to a remaining lifetime to optimize the whole thing, to optimize to a levelized cost of hydrogen. So I see a lot of potential here. Now in the automotive industry, virtualization is one of the biggest drivers for change. Give us some insight of the energy sector. How is it there? I would say it's not the energy sector is actually very different to automotive. The products are different. The way to develop is different. For example, on the product side, we are talking about products which are 10 to 15 years in the field. So you need guaranteed lifetime of 100,000 hours or even more. So if you look into a power plant, that's basically designed for a lifetime of 30 years. Which means also that the products are much, much longer in production. So that's on the one hand side, on the production side, on the product, the product cycle is completely different. But on the other hand side, also the way to develop products is very different. Because in the automotive, we all know in Europe we have this A, B, C, D sample, till start of production that doesn't exist in energy technologies. Nowadays in principle, they have in the energy world, we have a bond generation development approach. So as the first thing what you develop, is it a electrolyzer or whatever, goes already into the field in a field test, ideally with a friendly customer. You learn from that and feed that back into the design. But that's it, right? Then the thing goes into production. So it's very different to automotive. So coming back to the role of simulation, maybe we take a little deep dive here, looking at the electrolyzers, what capabilities do you see, especially at the electrolyzer development? We have one big thing we are working at the moment really is, even we have to separate of course different electrolyzer technologies, right? One topic we have put as a real focus topic this year is damage simulation and remaining lifetime prediction. So what we are doing here, we do that at the moment for pan-malacalizers, which are now getting a lot of attention in the market. It's pushed into the market by pretty big players like Siemens Energy, Nell, Plug Power, so really big players behind it. But what we see is still lacking on durability on the one hand side, but also on capability to predict the lifetime. And therefore we are now working here on a strategic approach to really break the total thing down into physics-based damage models, which allow us then really to have a virtual twin, which is basically simulating what's happening in real time. But we can then predict always based on certain operating parameters, the actual degradation status, and then do optimizations to extend the life, right? Because that's the objective. At the moment we are not meeting the industry touchers. So we need 60 to 80,000 of lifetime and we are probably at 40. Many people in our audience consider AVL as one of the leading players in the automotive and mobility industry. So everything you are talking about right here is outside of this industry. So why AVL? Whereas AVL's value and capabilities in this new energy sector. For AVL, new energy sector. Yeah. For electrolyzers, I think this synergy where we are coming from is the automotive fuel cell. We have developed, I don't know, 10, 15 fuel cells for automotive. An electrolyzer is a very similar process. And I think we have a lot of background to know how from the fuel cell, which we are not transferring to the electrolyzer. And I think it works quite well because we are also bringing in a little bit more systematic development approaches. And in particular what's not so used in the energy world is a lot of this simulation capabilities. So I think that's a real USB that we come with the whole automotive background from our development methodologies and bring them also with the domain now of the electrolyzer into the energy world. Of course we also have to change. We cannot now in the energy world do our ABC development which takes five years. Also we need to change in the development approach. But I think we learned that. We set it up. We have now standard development approaches for energy technologies. And that's I think now we have a little bit of a sweet spot to bringing the whole years of tech, tech, expertise from the automotive in the energy world. One more sudden change in this discussion and in this talk will lead us more to the team and the people behind this change that you mentioned. What are you looking for when establishing and developing a team to drive change as you mentioned? I think also here it's a various elements right. You need a certain technology know how you need you need the skill to develop such a product right. And this is also different to the past because for these electrolyzers we need completely different skills. It's not only mechanical engineering or something like that right. We bring in completely new skills like electrochemistry, chemistry in general. Of course we again have mechanical engineering for sure but there's a lot of electrical engineering. So it needs much more domain and skill knowledge from different areas. And from the personalities of course I believe I really like to work with with age people which are not so much process driven. And I think that's in general something in Europe we need to reconsider if we look into development times even on the automotive when we are twice as long or even more than our Chinese friends are developing these products right. So I think in general in everything we do we need to look how we become more ageile and do not block ourselves so much by methods and processes. Let's try to take a deep dive here as well. Have you ever seen examples in the energy and the development of electrolyzers maybe where you could see agility and having an agile approach? I think I have a pretty good example for that. So we started, for example, PEM electrolysis stack development which was really completely new for AVL. We started that last year. We have a dedicated team for PEM fuel cell stack design in Vancouver and Canada which we build up about six years ago. And we gave them the task last year. Guys now it's fuel cell is nice but now we need to electrolyze. And of course there were a little bit of hesitation some resistance but we convinced the team and they then put together a very very agile, very dynamic approach. So we started it in January and in September we had the first PEM electrolysis stack on the test bed which actually superior performance to the market. So we achieved 73% efficiency which in industry average is around 60 to 63 years or something like that. So even that a perfect result and then based on this result we could even already convince a month later one of the biggest energy technology companies of China to develop for a start of production a 2.5 megawatt electrolysis stack and that was only possible by a very agile team accepting the touch and go for it. Cool. Before we come to the finish line I want to go back to the virtual twin one more time. You have mentioned it. It is one of the most used buzzwords in probably every technology industry for sure in the automotive and in the industry sector and energy sector. What's behind a well working virtual twin? I think I can tell you where we want to go to because we are not there yet. So virtual twins of the industry is to some extent already using that for pretty simple tasks for predictive maintenance and things like that. But where we want to get to is really to extend what I mentioned before to extend that to really more reliable information on remaining lifetime, on durability, on recommendations for example to change the operating conditions to extent lifetime. And one additional aspect is of course electrolyzes are very much driven with renewable energies like solar and wind. So we might even include some weather information real time. some outlook for the next 7 years, sorry 7 days to really open. Optimize the strategy how you operate it optimized in terms of lowest possible degradation and at the end Considering all the weather environment also towards lowest cost of hydrogen which is the touch at the end of the day Great you mentioned something that we are working towards - what do you think is the timeline? Even one big step. I think we have it we are addressing this year with that with the damage models Because that's that's one of the key. I think when we have that Probably we need another year to implement the other functionality. So I think in about two years we could we could be there great Last question here if you had to give a 20 your 20 year old self Some advice for his future. What would it be? I Think it would be what to some extent I did also is is Stay with that what you really believe in right to what you believe in don't get distracted in this way Well to believe today there's a lot of distractions right and and a lot of that is is not necessarily helpful So really find the things you believe in and then follow this mission Thank you so much for your time You're welcome. It's nice to be Thanks for joining us on the AVL simulation podcast where engineering missions take off We hope today's journey through the world of simulation sparked new ideas and perspectives To keep up with future episodes subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and if you're ready to accelerate your digital engineering mission Visit avl.com for more insights Until next time keep simulating keep innovating and keep pushing the boundaries