Research News

This year’s ‘Meet the Professor’ event took place on 17 April. TU Delft uses the ‘Meet the Professor’ event to celebrate the city’s birthday together with primary schools. During this event, TU Delft professors give a guest lecture about their research at Delft primary schools. Professors Maarten van der Elst and Paul Breedveld represented the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in 2024.

From robots that stock shelves to aid during post-stroke rehabilitation, and from autonomous drones to self-driving cars. All these and more robots can now be found under one roof at TU Delft. On 17 April, the Cognitive Robotics department will open its brand-new lab where not only robots, but also researchers and technicians will come together. This should encourage cross-pollination of knowledge and creative solutions and take research into robotics to the next level.

Een speciale dag voor meisjes zodat zij kunnen ervaren hoe waardevol en leuk technische opleidingen zijn. Op 11 april was het weer tijd voor de jaarlijkse Girls’ Day. Bijna 80 leerlingen uit de eerste, tweede en derde klas van scholen uit Leiden en Schiedam kwamen naar de TU Delft en maakten kennis met techniek bij de faculteiten Mechanical Engineering (ME) en Civiele Techniek en Geowetenschappen (CiTG).

High waves startle mangroves for days during an experiment at the Delta wave flume in Delft. Researchers from Deltares and TU Delft keep increasing the force on the trees. They test how strong the mangrove trees are under extreme wave conditions and what contribution they make to water safety.

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced that Daniele Ragni will receive an ERC Consolidator Grant for his research on noise caused by the interaction of rotors with airframe components. The ERC Consolidator grant is aimed at researchers with 7 to 12 years of post-PhD experience and spans a duration of five years, providing ample support for groundbreaking research endeavors.

A while ago we thought it was no longer needed within TU Delft: a group entirely dedicated to maintaining and developing the use of high voltage. After all, the expectation was that the grid would become decentralised in the Netherlands, and that households would start generating their own electricity. This has partly become true, however, a vast amount of the renewable energy comes in large ‘chunks’, for example through offshore wind farms and large solar fields. "The fact is that we need high-voltage more than ever," Prof Peter Vaessen emphasizes. "This is also the reason we have a new, revived high-voltage group at TU Delft: the High Voltage Technologies Group."

The Council of Ministers has appointed Nitesh Bharosa of TU Delft as crown member of the Social and Economic Council (SER). Bharosa will advise the government, mainly on the theme of digitalisation. The appointment is valid for the period from April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2026.

Every time the robotic arm picks up a wafer for placement in the chip machine, very small particles are generated which are harmful for the chip production process. The Faculty of Mechanical Engineering from TU Delft is working on new generation wafer handlers that can handle wafers without particle generation.

"Techno-economic Assessment of CO2 Electrolysis: How Interdependencies between Model Variables Propagate Across Different Modelling Scales"

When working at the nanoscale, even a speck of dust can cause disruptions. That is why you find several clean rooms across the TU Delft Campus. In the clean room of Mechanical Engineering, researchers have the unique possibility to build mechanical structures at nanoscale, from top-down by sculpting materials and bottom-up by additive nanomanufacturing. The resulting devices find applications in a variety of fields, from biology to material science.

In Vietnam, the newly established Mangrove Living Lab has been put into operation. Here, ideas for restoring mangrove forests to protect the Mekong Delta from water are being tested. Today Minister Mark Harbers of Infrastructure and Water Management visited the lab, which is a result of years of cooperation in education and research between TU Delft and Thuy Loi University in Hanoi.

Can salt marshes serve as a natural solution for flood protection? Researchers of the project ‘Living Dikes’ transported 62 big blocks of salt marshes, containing soil and vegetation, from the coast of Friesland to the Delta Flume at Deltares. After four weeks of exposure to extreme waves, almost the entire salt marsh is still standing there.