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reading time: 4 min

Digital Water

Overflowing sewers, plastic waste and leaking water mains… the Netherlands and the world are facing water challenges below ground as well as above. Simple human effort alone is not enough to solve the problem, Professor Zoran Kapelan says. That is why he has been using Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.

reading time: 4 min

Shelf-stocking robot working independently

A robot that helps store employees by moving independently through the supermarket and shelving products in their proper place. According to researcher Carlos Hernández Corbato of the Department of Cognitive Robotics, this may be possible in the future. But the robot must be able to adapt to the dynamic and challenging conditions in a supermarket.

reading time: 4 min

The added value of closing resource flows by communities at the neighbourhood level

Residents of IJburg were keen to participate in sustainable development of the new urban district of Strandeiland. How should they approach this in practice? Els Leclercq and Mo Smit offered them some guiding principles with the ‘Value Flower Model’ and ‘Value Flower Field Maps’, the results of their ‘Waardevolle Wijken’ research into exemplary case-studies of community-based circularity initiatives on the scale of neighbourhoods and urban districts.

reading time: 10 min

Innovation needs a place to grow

Mitigating the impact of climate change, facilitating the energy transition, solving the housing crisis… The built environment needs to address pretty big challenges, which ask for innovative solutions. Students at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment have plenty of good ideas to create the necessary innovations, but how can their ideas successfully evolve?

reading time: 4, 5 min

With each other, for each other

Building more homes without rethinking the way we live together will not solve the fundamental issues with the housing crisis. Besides more quality homes for lower and middle incomes, we also need housing solutions that are sustainable, foster strong social connections and are affordable.

Collection Climate Action

reading time: 5 min

Sand on the horizon

It’s a decade since the creation of the Sand Motor, an artificial sand bank off the North Sea coast. What happens to a natural system following human intervention on such a large scale.

painting, bob rob, robot, paint robot, elkhuizen, joris van dam, ide, tu delft, industrial design engineering, delft design

reading time: 4 min

Painting is something that we see as an exclusively human skill - a combination of manual dexterity and creativity. Yet researchers at the Faculty of Industrial Design are investigating how far a robot can get in the art of painting. Painting Delft Blue tiles is the latest robotic highlight.

Paint robot Bob Rob serves Delft Blue apprenticeship

reading time: 9 min

‘As a student, you simply cannot get closer to the professional field’

Fitting new infrastructure into our densely built-up country is becoming increasingly complex. The Integrated Infrastructure Design minor teaches students how to handle this complexity. “This helps us to train a completely different type of engineer,” says minor coordinator Hans de Boer.

Andreia Martinho, PhD, TPM, artificial intelligence, ethics

reading time: 4 min

The rapid development of artificial intelligence brings its own set of new ethical challenges. In her PhD research, Andreia Martinho is trying to bring the ultra-theoretical world of ethics and the practice of artificial intelligence closer together.

Artificial intelligence with a moral compass

reading time: 4 min

A box full of jerry can water filters for refugee camps

In early May, Olivier de Gruijter packed a large box of Jerry Can Water Filters. Each one is handcrafted in his workshop. Finally they are going out into the real world, something he has been looking forward to for a long time. Refugees in Gaza and Iraq are going to use the prototypes for the first time. After studying Industrial Design Engineering, De Gruijter came up with a smart, compact water filter that you can screw onto any standard jerry can. A unique and sustainable filter system that rinses itself clean.

reading time: 4 min

Zooming in on and out of a circular region

Like the energy transition, the transition to a circular economy impacts the way we use space. So how should we go about planning structural reuse and value retention? For students on the Urbanism Master's track, this is not merely a theoretical question. A range of spatial strategies have recently been put forward for a circular South Holland region.

reading time: min

A giant pink rabbit on Grote Markt

A 7 metre tall pink origami rabbit has hopped its way over to the Grote Markt, making Delft’s living room its temporary hutch from May 30. The animal was designed with the Delft Fringe Festival in mind by two TU Delft computer science students. ‘We were positively shocked when we heard that we, two computer science students, had come up with the winner,’ Bartek Kotlicki from Poland and Irishman Ben Provan-Bessell said.

viewing time: 11 min

How to Print a Dinosaur

How to Print a Dinosaur? Find out how a combination of new and traditional techniques can be used to restore an ancient creature like never before!

reading time: 5 min

Safety in numbers in times of Corona? There can be.

When did we last dance at a pop festival, cheer on our favourite football team or get together with friends for a meal at a restaurant? It all seems an eternity ago. Dorine Duives misses the crowds as well, and not just for the atmosphere. As a TU Delft researcher Duives studies pedestrian crowd behaviour and the arrival of coronavirus and the 1.5 metre society has made her expertise more relevant than ever. As the crisis developed, the focus of her research became firmly centred on safe ways of opening up society again.

reading time: 6 min

Is hydrogen-powered air travel the future?

Hydrogen is a sustainable alternative to kerosene-powered air travel because there are no CO₂ emissions. But hydrogen is also associated with challenges and risks, such as the danger of explosion. TU Delft scientist Dr. Ivan Langella aims to use mathematical models, high-fidelity computational simulations and experiments to develop a zero-emission hydrogen-powered engine that will enable aircraft to fly safely and efficiently.

Collection Climate Action

reading time: 5 min

LandShapes: made to feel real

Master’s student in industrial design Frederik Ueberschär used artificial intelligence to create non-existent satellite images of the earth’s surface in his interactive installation LANDSHAPES. People can change these landscapes, and in this playful way he wants to involve them emotionally in climate change.

reading time: min

In search of the plastic soup

To better understand the whereabouts of floating plastic soup, you need to investigate how the water moves at different depths. Angeliki Laskari, researcher of Multiphase Systems at TU Delft, therefore studies fluid dynamics, the science of the movement and flow of water. Her ultimate goal is to help predict how plastic spreads in water.

reading time: 5 min

Sweet solutions to a salty problem

Some sixty kilometres, all the way up to Gouda, that’s how far inland the Rotterdam Waterway has been carrying salty North Sea water over the last few years.
Salt intrusion in Dutch rivers is a growing problem for the country’s drinking water supply and agriculture, not only in the Dutch delta but in deltas worldwide. Julie Pietrzak is trying to find better ways of predicting and combating the problem.

reading time: 3 min

Increasing demand for renewable energy will lead to the large-scale construction of offshore wind farms in the coming decades. This will result in increased environmental damage for marine life, because anchoring wind turbines in the seabed is currently still a source of noise disruption. GBM Works, a TU Delft spin-off company, has developed a much quieter method of building offshore wind turbines.