Research

Mapping minerals with sensor technology

Minerals are of great importance to our modern society. From smartphone to laptop, these elements are everywhere. First they need to be extracted from the earth however, an often environmentally taxing, slow and complex process. But this will change soon, if it’s up to PhD student Feven Desta. Desta researches sensor technologies to look for minerals in an environmentally friendly way.

Electricity from biogas

For people living in the rural areas of developing countries access to electricity is often non-existent or limited at best. Ralph Lindeboom is heading a team that is working on a biogas fuel cell system which generates electricity from organic waste (water). ‘In some ways Ugandan farmers and astronauts are very similar.’

Virus removal by low-cost ceramic membranes

Ten years after Doris van Halem’s graduation, the ceramic pot filter has become a major hygiene intervention tool. The system is of a brilliant simplicity: a ceramic pot with tiny holes filters larger micro-organisms, such as bacteria, from the water. The pots are now manufactured in factories around the world, using local materials. The only drawback is that viruses, which account for various water-borne diseases, such as hepatitis, are not removed. But fortunately Van Halem discovered something else as well all those years ago.

Climate adaptation starts (roof) top down

TU Delft is going to become a little bit greener on top: the roof of one of the lecture rooms of the faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences has been turned into a sustainable ‘polder roof’. The green blue roof can collect, store and discharge rainwater in a controlled manner. For researcher Olivier Hoes (Watermanagement) the roof is a field lab to research how this smart roof deals with heavy rains and heat stress.

Cycling for science at Ahoy

PhD students Alexandra Gavriilidou and Marie-Jette Wierbos have just finished an intensive cycling experiment. The checklist: 1000 metres of tape, 200 caps, 8 tracking cameras and 1 hall in Ahoy Rotterdam. Scientists have long shied away from predicting cycling behaviour but now TU Delft is gearing up to change all that.

Chasing droplets

Welcome to the Costa Rican jungle. A dense tropical forest, which hides bright coloured snakes between the ferns and monkeys in the trees. This ecosystem has one of the most complex water cycles in the world. Therefore it is the ideal setting for PhD candidate Cesar Jimenez Rodriquez to study evaporation. Once the rain stops, he chases water droplets to measure evaporation of the different canopy layers.

52° North: a tangible timeline

If you travel far enough north, sooner or later, you will reach the polar circle. A sign sometimes announces your arrival, like in the Finnish city of Rovaniemi, but you’re probably not always aware of crossing such an imaginary line. Everyone has heard of other geodetic latitudes like the equator and the tropics, but did you know there is also one running straight across campus: the 52nd degree of latitude?

Stories of Science