Volker Wittig received Diplomas in Mechanical Engineering from Technical University in Braunschweig and South Dakota State University. Initially he worked for the drilling industry as an R&D engineer in the USA, designing drilling, sampling and logging tools for soil, rock, groundwater as well as in-situ environmental, geotechnical and LWD applications. Since 2005 he has been with the International Geothermal Centre (GZB) in Bochum, starting up and managing the department for advanced drilling applications on national and international R&D projects with MS and PhD students, including teaching drilling classes. Parallel, a drilling and service company using DTH hammer technologies for the installation of ground source heat pumps together with heat pump manufacturers was in operation for a few years.
As of 1-2020, GZB was the nucleus for the new Fraunhofer IEG institute with its headquarter in Bochum and 5 other offices across Germany, where Wittig continues to lead the division on innovative drilling technologies. His current focus is on micro size, jetting type reservoir intervention / drilling, DTH fluid / mud percussion hammers, downhole sensors and data transfer, coiled tubing drilling as well as thermal based drilling applications incl. Laser, Electro Impulse and Plasma technologies.