Venture Clienting with MTU Aero Engines - Shape the Future of Energy and Aviation

What is MTU Aero Engines looking for?

In high-precision manufacturing and maintenance, ensuring the integrity of critical components is vital — In high-precision manufacturing and maintenance, ensuring the integrity of critical components is vital — yet current inspection processes remain largely manual and can be error-prone. Damages are marked directly on the part, but these markings may get lost during cleaning, and documentation can be incomplete or inconsistent, increasing the margin for error.

Accurate, digital damage localization is crucial for quality assurance, traceability, and process optimization — especially as components become more complex and tolerance requirements tighten to submillimeter levels. Existing solutions like camera tracking or AR glasses fail to meet the demands of accuracy, usability, and integration.

This challenge seeks to revolutionize the inspection process with a modular, digital solution that captures, localizes, and documents damages with ≤ 0.2 mm accuracy — without altering the part’s surface — paving the way for scalable, efficient, and transparent quality assurance in a demanding industrial environment.

Core Question

How can we develop a scalable and user-friendly software solution that includes the following areas:

• Damage Detection: Reliable, (semi-)automated identification of damages, even on complex or hard-to-access surfaces.
• Precise Localization: Submillimeter-accurate positioning of damages, accounting for part geometry and orientation.
•  Digital Documentation: Position accurate, traceable digital recording of surface findings e.g. on basis of CAD reference models, extendable by additional data e.g. classification, evaluation & measurement results.
•  Human-Machine-Interface: Marking of Damage Position must be very simple and intuitive, suitable for the shop floor (easy to use even for non-digital natives, dirt-resistant, robust)

Goals & Criteria

Solutions should aim to:

• Detect and document damages without altering or marking the material surface.
• Handle complex, rotationally symmetric parts and difficult-to-access surfaces.
• Provide robust, digital documentation of all findings, ensuring traceability over time.
•  Be modular, scalable, and adaptable to different component types and workflows.
•  Support a collaborative development approach and deliver a verifiable proof of concept (PoC).
• Manual detection and marking by the inspector should be precisely recorded (Achieve submillimeter ≤ 0.2 mm accuracy) into a digital model
• The localization should happen in the background without requiring specialist intervention by shop floor workers.

Possible Solution Ideas:

(teams with different approaches are highly encouraged to apply)

• Marking of damage position by a simple pen as a hand tool combined with (laser)-optical localization of the pen in the space
• Marking damage position by temporarily applying removable labels to the surface that are optically detected and localized

What Should Your Application Communicate?

You don’t need a fully market-ready product. Your submission should clearly demonstrate the value and maturity of your approach, including:

• What parts of your solution are already developed (e.g., working modules, UI mockups, pilots)
• What parts still require co-development and how collaboration with MTU Aero Engines would help
• Key technical requirements or dependencies
• A potential pilot scenario: scope, timeline, KPIs, and estimated resources required
• The long-term value proposition: e.g., co-development, licensing, portal integration

Who are we looking for?

We are looking for innovative partners who:

• Are open to co-developing and adapting their solution according to MTU Aero Engines’ needs
• Provide realistic and transparent expectations for piloting and scaling