Current Trainees

EngD candidate – Structural & Railway Engineering

The Netherlands contains many impressive civil engineering structures which were built in the previous century. A large part of the bridges, tunnels, locks, barriers and viaducts are aged over 50 years and have been intensively loaded more and more by heavier traffic during their lifetime. Rijkswaterstaat, the executive agency of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, has a major challenge with renovating and replacing many of these structures in the coming years.

In the province of South Holland multiple tunnels need to be renovated the coming decades, in order to keep them safe and available for the future. In order to ensure these tunnels to reach their intended lifespan of 100 years there are still some challenges to be solved regarding to the tunnel structures. One of them concerns the settlements which the immersed tunnels are subjected to. Measurements show greater and more uneven settlements occurring than was assumed during the design. This causes uncertainty with respect to the remaining lifespan of these tunnel structures.

As a Civil Engineer graduated from Delft University of Technology, I started the EngD programme with great enthusiasm and determination to take the challenge. From an early age I have always had a passion for civil engineering, especially for all those hydraulic structures we have in the Netherlands. In my research project a method will be developed that is able to predict the remaining technical lifespan of immersed tunnel structures with occurring settlements. This should be the first step of a predictive maintenance strategy that Rijkswaterstaat wants to implement in the longer term regarding our tunnel structures.

EngD candidate – Sanitary & Environmental Engineering

I’m Rogelio from Mexico and I’ve been part of TU Delft since 2018. Before the Netherlands I had the opportunity to live in Nicaragua and the US. In the US I completed my bachelors of civil engineering with a concentration in environmental engineering at the University of Kansas. During my 4 and a half years in Kansas I was able to work in a structural research lab and in environmental engineering lab were I collaborated on different projects ranging from testing concrete beams to investigating the settleability of aerobic granular sludge. In 2018 I joined the master’s programme of environmental engineering at TU Delft. At Delft my interests about water and wastewater treatment technologies continued to grow. As a student I completed an internship were I had the opportunity to work with different types anaerobic wastewater treatment reactors, that produced biogas for renewable energy. I completed my graduation project in the field of anaerobic wastewater treatment where I investigated the how the sludge characteristics impacted the flux of ultrafiltration membranes treating dairy wastewater.

Now I’m happy to continue at TU Delft as an EngD candidate. For my project I’ve shifted the focus from wastewater treatment towards resource recovery. I will be designing a treatment process to recover valuable materials from desalination brine. This is a multidisciplinary project collaboration with the Materials & Environment section at TU Delft and with NEOM the new semi-autonomous region that is being developed at the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I’m excited to be part of this project and to continue being part of TU Delft for the upcoming years.