Round about 200 customers and partners from all over the world came to celebrate under the motto
of “Going beyond - 100 Years Brunnenmuehle”
that expressed the self-confidence as one of the leaders in cutting-edge technology being de-veloped continuously for 100 years and being pushed again and again beyond the limits of hydro power industry solutions and mindsets.

A symposium opened the event, providing a comprehensive view on hydro power’s range of offers and opportunities in the background of global growth and related increase in energy demand. Apart from new views on hydro power and ocean energies, it also set focus on the growing import-ance of sustainability, safety and environmental issues in hydro power implementation.

The next day brought guests to the re-opening of the modernized Brunnenmuehle in Swabian Heidenheim. The laboratory and the new office building had seen an overall-investment of more than 20 million Euros.

The Brunnenmuehle, as the heart of Voith Siemens Hydro’s Engineering Company, which offers R&D services for all Voith Siemens Hydro operating units worldwide, nowadays accommodates 120 staff. These are more than half of the company’s development engineers working on complete hydro power units all over the world. Already for years, the Brunnenmuehle has established itself not only as a leading model testing lab, but also as a compe-tence and development center for complete hydro power units, including generators, excitation and control systems and also components such as butterfly and spherical valves.

After 18 months of work, all test rigs have been enhanced and extended in due time for the anni-versary. Today’s Brunnenmuehle testing capacities have doubled with significantly shortened cycle times. New super-computers allow for even more precise simulations for prediction of flows in hydraulic, magnetic and electrical fields of hydro power units.

Friedrich Voith, the son of company founder Johann Matthaeus Voith, had started to look at more pre-cise predictions already one hundred years ago to investigate the behavior of hydro machines: He acquired the Heidenheim mill that “Brunnen-muehle” had been until then, and turned it into a hydro turbine testing laboratory. With his const-ruction of an upper reservoir above the Brunnen-muehle, this lab in parallel became Germany’s first pumped storage plant with an exceptional one hundred meters of head for testing of turbines as early as 1908.

“Back then and today, latest technologies, methods and tools were the basis for development in the Brunnenmuehle making it the world’s most modern and high-performing model testing institution for hydro power”, said Dr. Roland Muench in the opening ceremony. “And, even though we hope, we don’t need model tests anymore in 100 years time: We certainly feel well prepared for the future!”

Voith Siemens Hydro Power Generation is a Group Division of Voith and - with a workforce of around 3,000 employees and an order intake of more than 1 billion Euros in the past business year – Voith Siemens Hydro Power Generation belongs to the world-wide leading companies for hydro power equipment.

Voith is setting standards in the markets paper, energy, mobility and service. Founded on 1 January 1867, and nowadays with approximately 40,000 employees, a turnover of 4.2 billion Euros and more than 270 locations worldwide, Voith is one of Europe’s large family-owned companies.

Voith is an official partner of the initiative “Germany - Land of Ideas.”