Archive

TU Delft Master's students of Technical Medicine, under the supervision of Prof. Jaap Harlaar, want to develop a simple and relatively inexpensive ventilator as soon as possible.

Current membrane fabrication processes are not sustainable because they are energy-intensive and require hazardous solvents. We are all familiar with the concept of 3D printing as it has been used in various fields in the last decades. However, it couldn’t find its contribution yet to the big industry of polymeric membrane production. Hanieh Bazyar, Department of Process and Energy, received NWO Open Competition Grant for her research on next generation 3D printed separation membranes.

How do you install a wind turbine far out at sea when high waves and strong winds make its installation virtually impossible? With this question in mind, a team of researchers from TU Delft, in collaboration with Heerema Marine Contractors (HMC) and DOT B.V., boarded the world's largest crane vessel this week: Heerema's Sleipnir. As part of a major pioneering project, the FOX project, they are exploring floating wind turbine installation.

In Dutch hospitals, over a million kilos of blue ‘wrapping paper’ is used each year to keep medical instruments sterile. After they have been used, they create an enormous mountain of waste. Researchers Tim Horeman and Bart van Straten devised a method to melt down this blue polypropylene wrapping paper and turn it into a new medical device.

Sebastien Callens, (former) researcher at the Department of BioMechanical Engineering in the field of biomaterials and bone implants, has received a Rubicon grant for a research stay abroad. He will be conducting research on bone mineralisation at Imperial College London. Callens is one of the 24 researchers who has received this grant from NWO.

Temitope Agbana, PostDoc researcher at the Delft Center for Systems and Control department, together with a team of researchers, designed the Schistoscope; a smart method for early and easy detection of Bilharzia, a deadly tropical disease.

Robotic body-weight support (BWS) devices can play a key role in helping people with neurological disorders to improve their walking. The team that developed the advanced body-weight support device RYSEN in 2018 has since gained more fundamental insight in BWS but also concludes that improvement in this field is necessary.

Making a significant contribution to creating opportunities for a CO2-free energy system, this is what 150 representatives from the business community, knowledge institutions and government are working on within the Dutch AI Coalition. The Energy and Sustainability working group collaborated on the position paper 'AI as an accelerator of the energy transition', which sets out the opportunities for a CO2-free energy system. Researchers from TU Delft have made an active contribution to this agenda.

At the request of medical professionals, researchers at TU Delft developed a test method to check whether imported face masks met the safety requirements. And that was necessary, as it turns out, because in total only one-third of the 140 million face masks tested in 19 hospitals passed the safety test.

Every trace or other piece of evidence at a crime scene has to be thoroughly examined. Traces that cannot be taken away or stored, such as blood spatters, is visualised with a ruler to indicate its size. TU Delft and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) have developed a new method for the police that will soon make the ruler obsolete and make it easier to measure all kinds of forensic evidence.

Angelo Accardo, assistant professor at the Department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering (PME), has been awarded two NWO Open Competition Grants to address this need by developing 3D engineered cell micro-environments using light-assisted fabrication techniques.

‘I don’t give instruction, I give feedback,’ says Peter Wellens. He has been elected best lecturer for the academic year 2020-2021 at the 3mE Faculty.

All students from the 3mE Faculty had the opportunity to vote for the best lecturer of the academic year 2020-2021. This award allows them show their appreciation for these lecturers’ unique and creative teaching styles.

Bart van Trigt, researcher at TU Delft’s Department of BioMechanical Engineering, worked with a team of scientists and scientific entrepreneur Erik van der Graaff to develop an injury model to reduce injuries: Pitch Perfect. Van Trigt received an ‘Implementeren met impact’ grant from ZonMw, which he can now use to test the injury model on Dutch players.

Almost 600 first-year mechanical engineering students at TU Delft spent six months working on the best possible design for a ‘Climbing Stacker’, which could help to assemble increasingly large wind turbines in a more efficient way, for example. The design that performed best technically received an award during the design competition on 16 June 2021.

Researchers of the 3mE and EEMCS of the TU Delft and two organisations within Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) are part of a project that has been awarded nearly € 25 million in EU funding for a project that will improve the sustainability of ports in the European Union .

In June 1921, exactly a century ago, Stanny Koopman was the first woman to graduate from the mechanical engineering programme in Delft. It would take another 40 years before Diny Lammens would replicate that feat, becoming the second woman to graduate in 1959. Nowadays, dozens of women graduate every year from the Mechanical Engineering master’s programme, and that number is rising steadily.

Maarten van der Elst, trauma surgeon at Reinier de Graaf and professor of safety at TU Delft, works daily with staplers and points out that research into malfunctioning specimens is difficult.

The Port & Maritime working group of the Dutch AI Coalition (NLAIC) has presented a position paper ‘Koersen op AI‘ (Heading for AI) on 10 June 2021, detailing the maritime ambitions in the field of AI. As part of the core group of this working group, TU Delft researchers have actively contributed to this joint agenda.

TU Delft is working with seven other partners on an autonomous system for cleaning the ocean floor. This system consists of a surface vehicle with two underwater robots, which are going to identify and collect litter from the ocean floor. Now that the crucial gripper component of the system has been completed, the SeaClear system is almost ready for field testing.

Finding new ways of protecting metal surfaces against corrosion: that is the aim of corrosion researchers Peyman Taheri, Yaiza Gonzalez-Garcia and professor Arjan Mol from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. They are joining forces with 11 partners from 7 different countries to accelerate the sustainable development and production of corrosion protection technologies.

All students should feel at home in the programme and feel challenged and free to develop their talents. To learn more about the potentially unconscious yet undesirable dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, 3mE is conducting a survey asking bachelor students about their perception of inclusion and diversity and their sense of belonging to the faculty.

Robots can perform jobs underwater that are too complex or dangerous for humans. That is, if they can manage on their own, because no one can help them down there. The REMARO project works on its control systems and trains PhD students in programming work.