Research News

Innovations from the wind energy sector seldom find their way to shipbuilding, despite undeniable similarities. Researchers in the areas of marine engineering and control engineering seize the opportunity offered by the cohesion programme to change this.

Dr.ir. Gerwin Smit from Biomechanical Engineering, 3mE faculty, TU Delft, has been nominated by New Scientist for the title of biggest scientific talent in the Netherlands and Flanders.

Prof. Dr. Kofi Makinwa, Professor Electronic Instrumentation and chair of the Micro Electronic department to the faculty of EEMCS, is selected as a new member of The Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW).

Researchers at Delft University of Technology, in collaboration with colleagues at the Autonomous University of Madrid, have created an artificial DNA blueprint for the replication of DNA in a cell-like structure.

A Dutch-Texan team found that most Houston-area drowning deaths from Hurricane Harvey occurred outside the zones designated by government as being at higher risk of flooding: the 100- and 500-year floodplains. Harvey, one of the costliest storms in US history, hit southeast Texas on 25 August 2017 causing unprecedented flooding and killing dozens. Researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Rice University in Texas published their results today in the European Geosciences Union journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.

De hexapod, 60 ton zwaar en 6x5x3 meter groot, is de nieuwste aanwinst van de TU Delft: een testfaciliteit die krachten van 100 ton in alle zes richtingen kan aanbrengen. Het apparaat kan onder meer in 4 weken de vermoeiing in gelaste scheepsstukken nabootsen van 20 jaar varen op zee, maar is ook breder inzetbaar om constructies beter te kunnen ontwerpen.

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded a grant of more than 17 million euros for the further development of the Netherlands Electron Microscopy Infrastructure (NEMI). The network consists of five university medical centres and eight universities, with Utrecht as the coordinating university. The grant will enable the scientists to combine various technologies in the field of electron microscopy and as a result to learn more about the composition and coherence of the biological and material micro-world.

This month the unique advanced iRASPA app has been launched. This app visualizes molecular structures of various types of porous materials with which material research can be facilitated and improved. In addition, it can help teachers with their explanation to students. The development of the iRASPA is done by a team of computational chemists: Dr David Dubbeldam (University of Amsterdam, Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences), Sofia Calero (Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville, Spain) and Thijs Vlugt, Professor of Engineering Thermodynamics at the Process & Energy (3mE).

Many types of mushroom have two different nuclei in their cells, one from the ‘father’ and another from the ‘mother’. Researchers at the universities of Delft, Utrecht and Wageningen have discovered that the genes from the parental DNAs are expressed at different times in mushroom development. “This means that when genes involved in mushroom formation are identified, we first need to find out whether the paternal or maternal nucleus is active,” says TU Delft doctoral candidate Thies Gehrmann. The research results were published in the journal PNAS on 11 April 2018.

Jenny Dankelman, full professor of biomechanical engineering, has received €120,000 from the Delft University Fund for her research project ‘Let’s make surgery safer and available for everyone’.

‘We find ourselves in an age where superhero films are immensely popular. With many students familiar with many of these characters and their superpowers, superheroes can facilitate a unique platform to aid in the dissemination of physics materials in the classroom’, says scientist Barry W. Fitzgerald of TU Delft. In a paper published in Physics Education on 5th April 2018, he considers Wonder Woman, Hawkeye and Invisible Woman.