Research

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.

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.

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?

Rivers from a distant past

Armed with a hammer and a pickaxe and with a drone flying overhead, Hemmo Abels studies the sediments left by rivers that once flowed across the plains of the United States. By means of painstaking detective work he is gradually piecing together a picture of how these rivers changed over time, a process influenced in part by ancient climate change. The data he is gathering sheds light on our own subsoil when it comes to detecting hydrocarbon and geothermal reservoirs. ‘The effects of climate on river systems have been hugely under-researched.’

Flatpack Buildings

Taking apart an entire multi-storey car park in the space of a couple of days and putting it back together again somewhere else without wasting any materials? It may sound like the engineering of a far-away future but it may happen sooner than you think. Recycling materials is common practice nowadays but is it the best solution for the environment? Milan Veljkovic and his team at TU Delft’s faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences knew there had to be another way.

Like sardines in a festival can

How does the crowd at an event move, when do people stop and how do you ensure that safety is not compromised? A large-scale experiment is being conducted at Delft University of Technology to gain a better understanding of the behaviour of pedestrians during busy events.

Micro-CT scanner reveals secrets hidden in prehistoric eggs

In 2016 archaeologists digging at a building site in Tilburg stumbled upon thirteen egg-shaped objects. Geoscientist Dominique Ngan put them in the micro-CT scanner of the Geoscience and Engineering Lab, studied the resulting 3D pictures and noticed some very interesting imprints in their shells. ‘A small find like this can shed a lot of light on a period we don’t know very much about.’

Stories of Science