Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight as the first man in space, Space Expedition Curacao opened ticket sales for suborbital flights from Curacao starting in January 2014.
The company Space Experience Curacao (SXC), founded by Ben Droste and F16 pilot Harry van Hulten, is set to operate a spacecraft, called Lynx, developed by the US’s XCOR Aerospace company, offering commercial trips to the edge of space. A launch will cost about 70,000 euros ($95,000 dollar), and approximately four launches can be performed per day. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with commercial spaceflight, curacao, Droste, Gagarin, manned spaceflight, Van Hulten, XCOR.
By admin
– april 14, 2011
With a bus full of self-built, McGyver-like equipment for giving demonstrations, Delft hydrologists have departed for Vienna. On the way back they’ll sample the Rhine.
There is barely room left to sit in Rolf Hut’s office at the faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences. Hut (MSc), an experimentally orientated hydrologist, points out the various instruments and explains what they’re used for – a wave basin to demonstrate Microsoft Kinect’s applicability as a wave detection device; a wooden windtunnel with a temperature sensor immune to direct radiation; and a perforated rain-pipe that functions like a large-surface rain meter. The more rain that has fallen, the higher the water sprays out of the sides of the perforated pipe. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with hydrology, McGyver, Rolf Hut.
By admin
– april 7, 2011
Sandia Labs (US) is about to test a novel system of converting heat into power generation. The system is based on supercritical carbon dioxide and efficiencies of up to 50 percent are expected, offering a huge boost to power generation from both nuclear and solar heat.
“This machine is basically a jet engine running on a hot liquid,” explains Steve Wright, principal investigator of Sandia’s Advanced Nuclear Concepts group, in Zeitnews. What Sandia National Laboratories has developed is a special kind of Brayton cycle, in which air is compressed and mixed with fuel, then ignited in a combustion chamber after which it expands into a turbine, which may then drive a generator. What’s so special this time however is that the medium driving the generator is not exhaust gases but rather supercritical CO2 – a state in which CO2 has the density of a liquid but behaves very much like a gas. Like air, it is first compressed to 200 bar and then heated by an external source (nuclear or solar heat) to about 500 °C, after which it erupts into the turbine at full blast. The thermal to power conversion may consequently reach 50 percent efficiency, according to Sandia. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with energy efficiency, solar energy, supercritical CO2.
By admin
– maart 31, 2011
Graphics: Marijn van der Meer
Nuclear reactors that don’t melt down, even if all cooling fails, can be made. But the development of the high temperature reactor has been slowed because other types are cheaper.
The Fukushima-1 reactor boils away several tens of thousands of litres of water per day, estimates Dr Jan Leen Kloosterman, of the Reactor Institute Delft (Applied Sciences faculty). The amount of heat that a switched-off nuclear reactor produces is initially about 6 percent of its full thermal power. That may not sound like much, but as Fukushima shows, it can lead to a desperate struggle to cool away the reactor’s heat. The people staffing the reactor know only too well the consequences of insufficient cooling: pressure building up, forced radioactive steam releases, hydrogen formation and explosions, melting of the core, possibly even damaging the reactor vessel, resulting in a much-feared melt-down or the ‘China syndrome’.
Over time the heat production diminishes. In a day’s time the power diminished by about 90 percent, but it will take six months before the heat production diminishes another 90 percent. All the time forced cooling of the fuel rods remains necessary to prevent releases of radioactive material into the surroundings. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with nuclear energy, pebble bed, reactor, safety.
By admin
– maart 24, 2011
Design: Human Powered Vehicle Team
Last week Human Power Team Delft presented its design for what is to become the fastest bicycle on Earth and beyond. “Our main advantage is the aerodynamics.”
The holder of the current world record speed for a human-powered vehicle is a Canadian, Sam Whittingham, who on 18 September 2009 reached the incredible speed of 133 kilometres per hour at Battle Mountain, Nevada, riding his Varna Tempest, which was designed and built by Georgi Georgiev. A YouTube clip shows his dagger-shaped bike flashing past. It’s hard to imagine how anyone can hope to improve on Georgiev’s creation. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with bicycle, bike, speed record.
By admin
– maart 17, 2011
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Lizu_tmpA
Posted in Web video.
Tagged with Andra, France, geological storage, nuclear waste, tunnels.
By admin
– maart 15, 2011
The smartphone on a field test - Photo: Jan Wilem Streefkerk
Can a smartphone application provide police officers with information that helps them operate more efficiently? Psychologist Jan Willem Streefkerk developed and tested a prototype.
A four-month long field test involving 30 police officers in Groningen (2007) revealed that location alone was not a relevant basis for sifting information from the police database. When for example a police officer was in the vicinity of a local prison, the officer was overwhelmed by dozens of messages saying that people who hadn’t paid their fines were living in this area. Six officers quit the test programme because they felt the information they received wasn’t worth the trouble of consulting the device.
“The information you send to police officers in the street should be context-aware,” says Jan Willem Streefkerk, a psychologist at TNO and a PhD student of Professor Mark Neerincx at the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science’s man-machine interaction group. ‘Context’ implies the system takes into account information about the receiver’s location, the task he or she is engaged in, and the priority level of the message. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with dynamic information, police, smartphone.
By admin
– maart 10, 2011
Karel van Dalen reads the waves - Photo: Tomas van Dijk
There is more information in seismic waves than is generally used, says Dr Karel van Dalen. His new wave processing method could benefit oil and gas explorations.
“It was one of my finest moments,” recalls Karel van Dalen (PhD student at Civil Engineering and Geosciences). “I had calculated the propagation of sound waves through porous stone and had predicted the waveforms at its surface. When I did the experiment some time later in the laboratory of the university in Leuven, the exact same waveforms appeared on the screen.” It confirmed to him that he was on the right track, and that he’d finally mastered the complex mathematics of how sound waves travel along the surface of and through porous material. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with geology, oil and gas explorations, seismology.
By admin
– maart 10, 2011
Thermograms by Michael Prodromou
Not only the exterior of BK-city is monumental, so too is its heat loss, says Michaelis Prodromou (MSc), whose graduation project focused on BK-city’s sustainable refurbishment.
Last week Michaelis Prodromou was one of the three laureates for the UfD-Cofely Energy Efficiency Awards. He originally came to Delft to pursue his Master’s degree in Building Engineering (Civil Engineering and Geosciences) because of the programme’s environmental aspects. “The Netherlands is a front runner in climate change studies, together with Germany, Denmark and Sweden,” Prodromou says on the telephone from Athens. He now works for the World Wildlife Fund developing an energy efficiency label for apartments. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with energy efficiency, refurbishment, renovation.
By admin
– maart 10, 2011
It seems impossible, yet it must be: nuclear waste stored in such a way that safety is guaranteed for hundreds of thousands of years. Under pressure from European legislation, the Netherlands has also launched a research programme.
The descent takes seven minutes. Everyone is packed tightly together in the narrow, steel elevator – all wearing boots, fluorescent jackets and light-mounted helmets, as well as carrying breathing equipment on their backs and alarms on their belts that sound should the wearer collapse. Spokesman Marc-Antoine Martin has wrapped a scarf five times around his neck as protection against the draught in the tunnel. “Only research is done here,” he shouts over the noise of the cables and pulleys. The underground laboratory will never actually be used for storing nuclear waste, although the locals living in this sparsely populated area of north-eastern France find that hard to comprehend. “You’ve been working on this for fifteen years already. Et alors, you still haven’t stored anything yet?” Martin is asked in a neighbourhood café.
Download as .pdf
Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delft Outlook.
Tagged with clay, nuclear waste, storage, underground.
By admin
– maart 9, 2011
