Research News

The first GROW project, ‘Gentle Driving of Piles’, received the approval of the Dutch RVO for granting a subsidy of 2.7 million euro. This project consortium is led by TU Delft and together with the GROW partners Boskalis, Deltares, DOT, Eneco, Sif, TNO, ECN, Shell, IHC, SHL and Van Oord, they will develop and test a novel pile installation method for offshore wind turbines.

In the future, a virtual coach could make a positive contribution to the therapy of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as war veterans or people who suffered sexual abuse in their youth. Such a coach could motivate people to persist with therapy and help them to recall traumatic memories as part of exposure therapy. The virtual coach was developed by Myrthe Tielman, who will be awarded her PhD at TU Delft on Thursday, 25 January.

The Department Materials Science and Engineering has received the sad news that our highly appreciated professor-emeritus Prof. dr. Hans de Wit, passed away in the night of the 21st / 22nd January 2018 in Broek op Langedijk at the age of 71 years. His funeral will take place in Schagen on Saturday January 27.

There is a lot of progress still to be made when it comes to batteries and energy storage. The problem of storing energy is often underestimated however. Gradual evolution in the world of batteries is more likely than a revolution. TU Delft's new batteries lab will focus primarily on research into potential alternatives for what is currently the standard technology: the lithium-ion battery.

Detecting a hidden layer in a top work of art by Rembrandt, identifying metal fatigue in ships, predicting arteriosclerosis: these are just a few of the possible applications of Smart*Light, a synchrotron that fits on a table. Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology and Delft University of Technology will build and develop this X-ray source within a consortium of other universities and companies. The high-intensity X-ray beam that this device will produce is now only available via large, expensive and scarce facilities. A symposium on Tuesday 23 January gets the research project officially under way.

Popular culture characters, such as superheroes like Iron Man, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Batman and Hawkeye, can provide a unique and engaging platform for the communication of difficult scientific concepts. In the classroom, these characters can be used to communicate learning objectives to students in an interesting, fun, and accessible manner by taking advantage of student familiarity with these superhero characters. Hawkeye, a member of the Avengers, is one such superhero who can be utilized by educators, as Barry Fitzgerald of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands) argues in the article ‘Using Hawkeye from the Avengers to communicate on the eye’, published in the journal Advances in Physiology Education.

Paulien Herder, professor of energy systems at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management and chair of the Delft Energy Initiative, joined the Department of Process and Energy part time on 1 January 2018 in order to run the e-Refinery initiative. E-Refinery is a university-wide initiative of TU Delft that sees three faculties (AS, 3mE and TPM) joining forces in the field of the electrification of the chemical and energy sectors.

Early December TU Delft and Makerere University with funding from Nuffic implemented a tailor made training on “Innovation and Entrepreneurship to aid agricultural value chains”. The training lasted 2 weeks during which TU Delft trainers and participants discussed and identified challenges in doing entrepreneurship along agricultural value chains.

The Department of Biomechanical Engineering will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2018. It’s still a relatively young department in a faculty that’s more than 150 years old, but nonetheless this is a moment well worth celebrating. How were the foundations of Biomechanical Engineering laid, one of the Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (3mE) faculty’s seven departments at TU Delft? In order to highlight this anniversary, this story recounts some anecdotes from the past fifty years.

When the opportunity arose to set up a cohesion project, Burak Eral did not hesitate for a second. Burak Eral is a Tenure-Track lecturer at the Department of Process & Energy in the area of crystallisation & solids processing. He knew right away who he wanted to work with: Luigi Sasso, a Tenure-Track lecturer at the Department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering and an expert in the area of micro-manufacturing and sensors. A good match, as it turns out. Burak and Luigi have come up with a method to fight kidney stones.