Dr. Ing. Heinz Gross was born in 1950 in Berlin, Germany. He studied mechanical engineering at the RWTH Aachen, Germany, with concentration on plastics processing. Passed his PhD in 1983 with Prof. Menges at the Institut für Kunststoffverarbeitung (IKV) in Aachen, Germany. Thereafter he worked for Röhm GmbH as head of the R&D of extrusion processes and of extruded products. In 1990 he became head of R&D of the technical products group of Röhm.

In 1993 he left Röhm and founded Gross Kunststoff-Verfahrenstechnik and focused on improving extrusion processes. The main goal of his work is to find new technologies which help to improve the quality of extruded parts and in the same time to reduce the production costs and ideally to facilitate extrusion processes. He holds several patents protecting for instance his special Membrane-technology for slit dies and the Flex Ring- and Tilting-technology for annular dies. These technologies allow for a fine tuning of the flow channel geometry in the interior of extrusion dies in order to be able to further reduce thickness tolerances for instance in films, sheets or pipes. The GWDS-technology which is his youngest development is a totally new philosophy to design dies for extrusion blow molding. It is an astonishing simple solution which enables to tailor the thickness of the parison in axial and also in circumferential direction in order to reach the wanted thickness distribution in the final blow molded parts.

In 1997 he additionally founded the Gross Messtechnik to develop new on-line measuring systems for the monitoring of important process parameters in extrusion lines. The realized bank measuring systems and a system to monitor the outer wall thicknesses of double walled sheets are a precondition to establish a closed-loop control for important extrusion parameters while operating dies with adjustable flow channels. The results of his work are published in over 200 technical papers and various international patents.