Research News

The Open Science Programme was pleasantly surprised by the number of proposals: 29 were submitted by TU Delft Lecturers.

Cumulus clouds over land start to disappear almost instantly during a partial solar eclipse. Until recently, satellite measurements during the eclipse resulted in dark spots in the cloud map, but researchers from TU Delft and KNMI were able to recover the satellite measurements by using a new method. The results may have implications for proposed climate engineering ideas, because disappearing clouds can partly oppose the cooling effect of artificial solar eclipses. The results were published today in Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

A coating that can hide objects in plain sight, or an implant that behaves exactly like bone tissue. These extraordinary objects are already made from ‘metamaterials’. Researchers from TU Delft have now developed an AI tool that not only can discover such extraordinary materials but also makes them fabrication-ready and durable.

‘People living near an airborne wind energy test site in Germany experience noise, ecological and safety impacts from the airborne wind energy system similar to those from the nearest regular wind farm. The airborne system did score better on visual impacts.’ These are the main conclusions from a pioneering study into the social impacts of airborne wind energy conducted by Helena Schmidt, a PhD candidate at TU Delft in collaboration with Medical School Hamburg.

TU Delft’s Supervisory Board has reappointed Professor Tim van der Hagen as Rector Magnificus/President of the Executive Board of TU Delft. The reappointment comes into effect on 1 May 2024 and runs until 7 October 2026.

Commodifying heat. That is the ultimate goal of TU Delft professor of Heat Transformation Technology Kamel Hooman. In the future, consumers could store heat they do not use and sell it in a market. In this way, total energy loss could be halved. Crucial here is that heat can be efficiently stored and transported. Hooman will explain how he intends to achieve this in his inaugural speech on 7 February.

Shaking a baby violently can cause head and neck injuries, blindness and in some cases even death. Researchers at TU Delft, faculty of Mechanical Engineering, are using a dummy baby and computer models to map the accelerations that act on the head during shaking. They want to be able to assess the risk of injury more accurately. This could eventually lead to more clarity in legal cases on the subject.

“With floating wind energy technology tested in hybrid labs we can radically scale up and speed up the use of offshore wind energy in the energy transition,” says Axelle Viré, Full Professor of Floating Wind Energy at TU Delft in her inaugural speech on 16 February 2024.

AI has the potential to support crowd crises decisions, yet the increasing use of AI has led to a debate about the legal and ethical implications. To address these challenges, the AI-COMPASS consortium, led by TU Delft, develops real-time decision support systems, considering context, behaviour, and values. The project is financed by the Collaboration between Humans and (semi-)Autonomous systems programme of NWO.

On 30 January 2024, PhD candidate Esther Roosenbrand’s study on contrails and air traffic management was featured in an article from the New Scientist, presenting a simple yet effective operational solution to reduce the climate impact of aviation.

The percentage of female students starting in the Bachelor of Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft has not been increasing for several years. The percentage is currently around 20%. "That is not enough as far as we are concerned. That’s why we want to increase the proportion to 30% at once with the intake of the coming academic year," says Director of Education Joris Melkert.

Making digitised collections of old maps more usable for research and students is the mission of Jules Schoonman, digital curator at TU Delft Library.

Industry-academia collaboration hub Fujitsu Advanced Computing Lab Delft at Delft University of Technology to drive development of advanced quantum computing technologies