Research News

How do you install a wind turbine far out at sea when high waves and strong winds make its installation virtually impossible? With this question in mind, a team of researchers from TU Delft, in collaboration with Heerema Marine Contractors (HMC) and DOT B.V., boarded the world's largest crane vessel this week: Heerema's Sleipnir. As part of a major pioneering project, the FOX project, they are exploring floating wind turbine installation.

On the 15th of November a new TPM MOOC will start in which professor Kornelis Blok will focus on designing a climate neutral world. Participants will learn about climate change strategies and are given basic tools used for evaluation alternative options for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

In Dutch hospitals, over a million kilos of blue ‘wrapping paper’ is used each year to keep medical instruments sterile. After they have been used, they create an enormous mountain of waste. Researchers Tim Horeman and Bart van Straten devised a method to melt down this blue polypropylene wrapping paper and turn it into a new medical device.

Sebastien Callens, (former) researcher at the Department of BioMechanical Engineering in the field of biomaterials and bone implants, has received a Rubicon grant for a research stay abroad. He will be conducting research on bone mineralisation at Imperial College London. Callens is one of the 24 researchers who has received this grant from NWO.

In order to ensure that the electricity grid is prepared for the future, TU Delft, the Dutch government and partners including grid operator TenneT have joined forces to build a brand-new laboratory: the Electrical Sustainable Power Lab, otherwise known as the ESP Lab. The laboratory – described as a ‘veritable temple of sustainability’ – will be officially opened on the afternoon of Friday, 1 October 2021.

Temitope Agbana, PostDoc researcher at the Delft Center for Systems and Control department, together with a team of researchers, designed the Schistoscope; a smart method for early and easy detection of Bilharzia, a deadly tropical disease.

Robotic body-weight support (BWS) devices can play a key role in helping people with neurological disorders to improve their walking. The team that developed the advanced body-weight support device RYSEN in 2018 has since gained more fundamental insight in BWS but also concludes that improvement in this field is necessary.

Last year, computer engineers from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and Northwestern University introduced the world’s first battery-free Game Boy, which harvests both solar energy and the user’s kinetic energy from button mashing to power an unlimited lifetime of game play. The same team now introduces a new platform that enables makers, hobbyists and novice programmers to build their own battery-free electronic devices that run with intermittent, harvested energy.

On 9 September 2021, the NWO-INSPiRED project was awarded the prestigious Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) Innovation Prize. The award-winning proposal is built around the Schistoscope, a novel device that combines technical optics and specialised data-driven algorithms to create an integrated, portable, reliable smart optical diagnostic system for schistosomiasis. The INSPiRED team (a collaboration between TU Delft (IDE-3ME), LUMC, and three Sub-Saharan research partners) is honoured to receive the award and $20,000. They will use this money to continue testing and evaluating the Schistoscope in Nigerian primary schools and to help implement the device in the local healthcare system

At the request of medical professionals, researchers at TU Delft developed a test method to check whether imported face masks met the safety requirements. And that was necessary, as it turns out, because in total only one-third of the 140 million face masks tested in 19 hospitals passed the safety test.

Every trace or other piece of evidence at a crime scene has to be thoroughly examined. Traces that cannot be taken away or stored, such as blood spatters, is visualised with a ruler to indicate its size. TU Delft and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) have developed a new method for the police that will soon make the ruler obsolete and make it easier to measure all kinds of forensic evidence.

Angelo Accardo, assistant professor at the Department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering (PME), has been awarded two NWO Open Competition Grants to address this need by developing 3D engineered cell micro-environments using light-assisted fabrication techniques.

‘I don’t give instruction, I give feedback,’ says Peter Wellens. He has been elected best lecturer for the academic year 2020-2021 at the 3mE Faculty.

All students from the 3mE Faculty had the opportunity to vote for the best lecturer of the academic year 2020-2021. This award allows them show their appreciation for these lecturers’ unique and creative teaching styles.