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Discover the stories of researchers at the
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering.

Protecting vital infrastructure from cyber-attacks with physics-inspired AI

From home-heating to power plants, it is control systems that ensure the proper, or even optimal, operation of any physical system that must respond to unpredictable conditions. By adding so-called physics-inspired AI, Riccardo Ferrari believes these control systems can also help provide a next-level defence against malicious, sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Rethinking transport in cities

Half-loaded delivery vans with logos in colours ranging from purple to red cruise along the same narrow cobbled street. There is plenty of space on the adjacent canal, which was once used to transport goods. ‘We can do much better than this,’ associate professor Bilge Atasoy keeps thinking as she walks through the city.

Feeling the digital

Have you ever wondered what the fabric feels like on a jumper you were thinking to order online? Or wanted to touch the hand of your distant relatives through your computer screen? Assistant professor Yasemin Vardar knows exactly how you feel. For years, we’ve been able to send and receive digital packets. But we can’t do that for ‘touch’. In 2020, she founded the Haptic Interface Technology Lab to change that.

Using sound waves to make microchips and detect faults

Researcher Gerard Verbiest works on new chip technology using sound. Together with researchers at ASML, he investigates, among other things, how to apply sound to look inside a chip.

Shape-adaptable DNA origami for next level biosensing

DNA origami already is an unrivalled construction method for building nanoscale structures with near-atomic precision. By combining it with machine-inspired design, Sabina Caneva adds mechanical reconfigurability. She uses this to build nano-actuators and size-adjustable nanopores for next level biosensing.

Modelling crowd behaviour for ultra-large ship design

For the past two years, quantum sensing technology specialist Richard Norte (Department of Precision Microsystems Engineering) has been working intensively with machine learning expert Miguel Bessa (Department of Materials Science & Engineering) - a collaboration that has led to a real breakthrough in science.

Designing a wearable robotic device to apply forces and measure responses in the human arm

Winfred Mugge (BMechE) and Volkert van der Wijk (PME) started a Cohesion Project with the goal of designing a wearable low-mass device that can produce strategically timed perturbations, without interfering with the normal behaviour of the arm.