Archive

How do a hand prosthesis and an operation tool work? What are some sustainable solutions for beach litter? And what kind of technical innovations can you work on as a student team? During Girls’ Day 2022, 40 girls from the 3rd and 4th year of pre-university education (VWO) were introduced to the world of mechanical engineering.

Imagine you could feel the brush strokes of Van Gogh, the fur of your beloved pet on a zoom call, fabrics in online shopping or tissues in medical images. Yasemin Vardar, assistant professor at the department of Cognitive Robotics (CoR), wants to enable this breakthrough by developing friction-modulation haptic displays. This week she received Veni funding from NWO for her research idea.

Another 78 promising young scientists receive Veni funding of up to 280,000 euros from NWO. This concerns sixty researchers from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SGW) domain and eighteen from the Applied and Technical Sciences (TTW) domain, who can further develop their own research ideas over the next three years. The Venis for the ENW and ZonMW domains were announced in December 2021.

Oil and gas shortages are not only pushing up the prices of gas and petrol, but also plastics, medicines and cosmetics. To make our society less dependent on fossil fuels and combat climate change, the chemical industry needs to change radically. In recent years, TU Delft and TNO have laid the foundation for cleaner production processes in the chemical industry. The new e-Chem partnership is now taking this a step further by actually constructing a clean factory of the future.

Javier Alonso-Mora at the Department of Cognitive Robotics (CoR) has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, while Daniel Tam at the Department of Process and Energy (P&E) has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant.

Together with Renault, Delft robot engineers developed the Proactive Eco Mode, a new system that enables drivers to reach the desired speed faster, based on predictions of the future, while maintaining the eco fuel benefits. They have successfully demonstrated the system on French roads.

Remco Hartkamp, Max Döpke en Fenna Westerbaan van der Meij, researchers at the department Process & Energy, are shedding new light on the role of surface reaction rates of liquid in electrokinetic transport.

Three promising cross-border collaborative projects of the TU Delft consortium e-Refinery have been granted the electrochemical conversion and materials (ECCM) KICkstart grant by NWO (Dutch Research Council).

Matin Jafarian, researcher of Delft Center for Systems and Control and Ajay Seth, researcher at BioMechanical Engineering, have been awarded the NWO Open Competition Grant for their unique research.

Sabina Caneva and Richard Norte, researchers of the department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering, have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant by the European Research Council.

TU Delft is launching – in collaboration with infrastructure specialist Firan, the City of Amsterdam and the AMS Institute – the ‘Digital Heat’ project in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam (MRA). The goal is to develop a future-proof low temperature heat network in Amstel III Zuid using residual heat from a nearby data centre.

It looks like an old-fashioned steamboat with two tall chimneys. In reality, the 154-meter-long cargo ship SC Connector - with modern wind-powered propulsion - sails into the port of Rotterdam. "An important development."

Twenty-five companies and knowledge institutes in the maritime industry have joined forces in SH2IPDRIVE: Sustainable Hydrogen Integrated Propulsion Drives. In this innovation programme, they will work together to make hydrogen shipping a reality.

How can humans instantly estimate the slipperiness of a surface and adjust their gripping, for instance when picking up a wet glass? Researchers have demonstrated that a (radial) strain of the skin of the fingertip is involved in the perception of slipperiness during initial contact. Robotics could use this information, for instance to improve prosthetics and grippers. The results will be published in PNAS.

Mudnet, the Delft-based multidisciplinary team consisting of marine and civil engineers researching the properties of mud, won the NWO ‘Team Science Award’ this week. The team was praised for using a great diversity of expertise in subject.

Researchers from TU Delft developed a method to watch the formation of kidney stones on a microscale, in a so called microfluidic platform. By slightly adjusting the pH and the concentration of specific minerals, the formation could be slowed down or inhibited completely. The research is now published in Biomicrofluidics.

A team of researchers from TU Delft managed to design one of the world’s most precise microchip sensors; the device can function at room temperature – a ‘holy grail’ for quantum technologies and sensing.

In her research project ‘MechanoPore’ Sabina Caneva works on the development of programmable, shape-shifting DNA origami nanovalves for size-selective delivery of biomolecules across cell membranes. The NWO Domain Board Science has awarded Caneva for her research in the Open Competition Domain Science-XS.