Archive

A number of internal relocations have taken place in the 3mE building the past year and one of them was the relocation of the Wave-Flume Tank. The tank has been moved from building section J to the API hall nearby in Leeghwaterstraat to create space for projects being conducted in the Fluid Mechanics Lab. The Wave-Flume Tank has returned home: at the Ship Hydromechanics Lab.

Michaël Wiertlewski, Assistant Professor at the Cognitive Robotics Department, and his colleagues have created a glass plate that can quickly change its friction. It does this with an actuator that releases waves of ultrasound to vibrate the plate. Their research is published in the ‘Royal Society Interface journal’.

Vijayendra Umesh Shastri from the Precions and Microsystems Engineering Department has been awarded a NOW-XS grant for his quantitative de-cellurarization with single-cell resolution project.

Mohammad Khosravi has been granted the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich) medal for his doctoral thesis titled "Side-Information in Linear and Nonlinear System Identification".

His research is based on a previous ERC grant on graphene nanoparticles, in which centrifugation was used to sort particles by size classes.

John van den Dobbelsteen has been appointed professor of Medical Process Engineering. His research focuses on improving the interaction between surgical staff and medical technology, with a particular emphasis on alleviating hiccups in the workflow throughout the entire surgical process, from pre-op to post-op.

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded Mahinder Ramdin (P&E) an NWO-xs grant for his ‘Green Ammonia Production’ project, GAPLiC. Ammonia is important in the production of fertiliser, and therefore mass food production, but the current ammonia production process consumes enormous amounts of energy - 1% of all the energy produced globally.

During ‘Meet the Professor’, four 3mE professors visited several Delft primary schools. They gave fifth and sixth grade pupils guest lessons dressed in togas.

Spiropyrans are chemicals that change colour when you shine light on them – a useful property in many areas of medicine and technology. Now Georgy Filonenko and his colleague, Richard Janissen at the Faculty of Applied Science have discovered a new use for these so-called photochromic molecules - visualising stresses in solid polymers. Their research is published in the ‘Journal of the American Chemical Society.’

Lidy Fratila-Apachitei and Murali Ghatkesar received a Cohesion grant to investigate how 3-D printed pillars with features in the sub-micrometre range can affect adhesion and mechanics of living progenitor cells at single cell level. Together with postdoc researcher Livia Angeloni and the other collaborators, they developed and applied a novel method based on fluid force microscopy.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the need for prosthetic hands has increased sharply. TU Delft researcher Gerwin Smit has designed a prosthetic hand that can be made through a combination of 3-D printing and laser-cutting, which means that they be produced easily and relatively cheaply in countries that have little money to spend on such things. These prosthetic hands are already being used in India and now, the Indian technology company Vispala has donated 350 of Smit’s 3D-printed prosthetic hands to war victims in Ukraine, sponsored by the American IT-company, Cisco.

De Winter’s research focuses on touchless interaction between robots and humans so that in the future, robots can read and understand the intentions and instructions of humans in their vicinity by means of eye-tracking and other sensors. And robots, in turn, will be able to adapt their functioning to communicate their own intentions both to nearby humans and other robots. The vision is to contribute to a future in which humans and robots share cognitive processes and adapt to each other.

Following the success of SeaClear1, which showed that a system of autonomous robots can detect and remove litter from the seafloor, the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme has awarded a second project, SeaClear2.0, nearly 8 million euros to extend the use of multiple robots working together to identify and collect even heavier objects from deeper seas.

Understanding the mechanobiology of glioma cells is of paramount importance for prospective treatment screening of this brain tumour. Nastaran Barin and Angelo Accard developed, in a joint effort with Erasmus MC, biomimetic 3D structures via two-photon polymerization and cultured therein patient derived glioma cells.

A smart alternative to the traditional sandbag and an experiment with clay to learn more about strengthening dikes. These are two examples of TU Delft research that is currently being exhibited as art at the Rijksmuseum.

Saskia van Heumen has been voted TU Delft’s Best Graduate 2022 for her outstanding research on the use of LED photoacoustics in treating Lymphoedema.

Today, at the TU Delft Best Graduate Award Ceremony 2022, eight recently graduated engineers presented their research and results of their excellent master thesis. Ir. Saskia van Heumen, graduate of the Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (3mE), received the prestigious title TU Delft Best Graduate 2022. For her graduation research, Saskia developed a method to accurately image lymphatic vessels in patients.

The European Research Council has awarded an ERC Starting Grant to Ali Akyildiz. Akyildiz’s research focusses on cardiovascular biomechanics, specifically individual people’s susceptibility to cardiovascular events, such as heart attack and stroke, due to biomechanical failure in their blood vessels. This 1.5 million euros grant is to cover the costs of a five-year research programme, and is awarded to researchers who are at the start of their career, but have already excelled in a promising line of research.

Ajay Seth has been awarded a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) grant of US$ 350,000 to develop his project, OpenSim Creator. This open-source biomechanical simulator will enable researchers worldwide to create accurate neuromuscular and musculoskeletal models within hours, enabling better and faster responses to biomedical questions about human and animal mobility.

Scientists of TU Delft and four other Dutch universities join forces to save energy in drying processes. In the ELECTRIFIED project, the researchers will use the power of electricity and electrical fields to develop breakthrough technologies for large energy savings in industrial drying processes.

How did ancient humans learn to make tools? And can we apply that knowledge to help AI-based robots learn creative skills? Carlos Hernandez Corbato and Geeske Langejans are heading up the TU Delft part of the multi-national METATOOL project, which is a unique combination of archaeology, neuroscience and robotics.

The first fully-automated demo of AVATARs - autonomous emission-free waterways vessels - took place on the pond in front of the 3mE building. Three model-scaled vessels neatly demonstrated their manoeuvrability, precision controlled turning and steering capabilities thanks to long-range Wi-Fi and 4G communications and newly-developed AI directed collision-avoidance technology.

At the bottom of the ocean lie lumps of valuable metals such as copper, manganese, nickel and cobalt - materials crucial to accelerating the energy transition. A collaboration between five European countries called ‘Blue Harvesting,’ has designed and now tested a new collector that can gather these nodules from the deep sea bottom with minimal disturbance to the natural environment.

The maritime sector needs batteries for the transition to zero-emission shipping. Different ships with different operational profiles may require different batteries. The NWO Executive Board has awarded funding to two research projects of maritime researchers Henk Polinder and Andrea Coraddu. Both will focus on improving the use of different battery systems. The awards involve a sum of 4.2 million euros.

NWO has awarded funding to six technology-science research projects from the Open Technology Programme. One of these is the e-HEAT project by researchers Jurriaan Peeters, Ruud Kortlever and Lorenzo Botto from the Process & Energy Department. In this project they are working on the development of large-scale CO2 electrolysers that enable large-scale energy storage on a seasonal time scale possible. The outcomes are expected to also benefit H2O electrolysers and fuel cells.

Wind turbines are getting bigger and bigger and the wind speed is never the same on every part of the rotor – the rotating part of a wind turbine. That is why it is important to carry out experiments using non-uniform wind fields: fields in which the wind speed is not the same everywhere. With the opening of TU Delft’s Wind AI Lab – a globally unique wind tunnel – this will become possible.

All students at the 3mE faculty were given the opportunity to vote for the best lecturer of 2021-2022. The votes are a token of their appreciation for the unique and creative way in which the lecturers concerned teach. Good lecturers are indispensable for the quality of 3mE’s programmes.