Long Lam - Photo: Tomas van Dijk
Batteries represent half of the value of electric cars. Yet, until recently, no one could clearly assess a battery’s state of health.
Long Lam (MSc) won the best thesis prize for e-mobility, awarded by Urgenda, a sustainability organisation, on 11 November – Sustainability Day. Jury president Auke Hoekstra (MSc) appreciates the clarity that Lam brought to the condition of batteries, and hopes that Lam’s battery model will now remove much of the uncertainty that is presently holding lease companies back from including electric vehicles in their fleets. Continued…
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Tagged with batteries, Electric vehicles, lithium-ion battery, Long Lam, Pavol Bauer.
By admin
– november 24, 2011
Leonie Marang - Photo: Tomas van Dijk
Bioprocess engineer Leonie Marang receives the Unilever research prize today for her Master’s thesis on plastic-producing bacteria that thrive on waste streams.
Only the fat ones survive in Leonie Marang’s reactors at the laboratory of Environmental Biotechnology (Applied Sciences). The bacteria here, which come from activated sludge, live under feast and famine conditions. They are fed acetate and lactate (typical ingredients of an industrial waste stream) for 15 minutes, after which the supply stops and the bacteria are left starving for about half a day. Only those bacteria that are very efficient in converting the food stream into storage polymers – visible inside their bodies as white granules – survive this regime. The result is a bacterial population that is incredibly efficient (up to 90 percent of their body weight) in making and storing polymers, generally known as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) or more popularly as degradable bio-plastic. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with bioplastics, Leonie Marang, Mark van Loosdrecht, PHA's, Unilever research prize.
By admin
– november 24, 2011
Next year will see the construction of the first European solar power plant in Africa, reports the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The 500-megawatt solar power tower is the first concrete step taken by the Desertec consortium – a German industrial alliance that aims to develop large-scale solar power installations in North-Africa, which will provide 15 percent of Europe’s power needs by 2050. The total investment is estimated at 400 billion euros. The first step, a 500 MW solar plant in Morocco, cost 2 billion euros. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with Desertec, Germany, HVDC, solar plant, solar power.
By admin
– november 24, 2011
Photo: Tomas van Dijk
However eco-friendly they may be, wind turbines are not very popular with people – unless these people happen to own them. For his graduation project Hengfeng Chi (Industrial Design and Engineering) set out to design a turbine that is like candy to the eyes.
Together with former TU techno-starter Actiflow, now an engineering company based in Breda that specialises in aerodynamics, Chi chose the Pier of Scheveningen as the ideal location for the urban wind turbine. The Pier has a lot of undisturbed wind and people don’t live close enough to hear any of the noise the turbines might produce. Plus the once-famous tourist magnet could do with a new attraction. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with Actiflow, Hengfeng Chi, Scheveningen, wind turbine.
By admin
– november 17, 2011
Gussto satelite - SRON artist impression
TU physicists are building terahertz sensors for Nasa’s ballooning mission, Gussto, set for launch in 2017. The mission will study interstellar dust and gas clouds where stars are born.
Terahertz astronomy opens a new window on the universe. In between radio waves and infrared radiation, terahertz waves travel long distances through interstellar space. On Earth however virtually all radiation is absorbed by moisture in the atmosphere, which is why terahertz astronomy, which promises to give clues about how stars and planets are formed out of gas clouds, is only practiced from the highest mountain peaks (Alma in Chile) or from satellites (Herschel space telescope, launched in 2009). The proposed Gussto mission will use a balloon to reach the edge of space at an altitude of 36 kilometres above the South Pole. The mission’s duration is two periods of 50 days each, with a refill in between for topping up the cryogenic helium.
The Gussto (Galactic/galactic Ultra long duration balloon Spectroscopic Stratospheric THz Observatory) mission is led by Professor Christopher Walker (University of Arizona), who selected SRON (Netherlands Institute for Space Research), and TU researcher Dr Jian-Rong Gao, to serve as the mission’s detectors. Why? “Because we’re the best in the world,” Gao explains, referring to the experience that Professor Teun Klapwijk’s research group at the Kavli Institute of NanoScience has in building terahertz detectors. The group was also involved in making the Herschel and Alma detectors. Continued…
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Tagged with astronomy, Jian-Rong Gao, Nasa, SRON, terahertz.
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– november 17, 2011
Prof. Witkamp has been awarded the prize for having set in motion the first steps towards a new industrial ecology - Photo: Tomas van Dijk
Professor Geert-Jan Witkamp will receive the DOW Energy Prize on Thursday. His separation technology based on freezing uses only 15 percent of the energy needed for evaporation.
About a quarter of all the world’s energy is used for industrial separation processes, Professor Geert-Jan Witkamp (3mE) estimates. Back in 1995, when the professor came across the accidental effect of salt being separated from a freezing solution, he decided to use the phenomenon as the foundation for a new separation process called ‘eutectic freezing crystallisation’, or EFC for short. Prof. Witkamp discovered that when lowering the temperature of ice slurry, one encounters the crystallisation point (eutectic point) of the salt solution. The salt, which typically sinks to the bottom of the crystallisator, may then be retrieved in pure crystals, while pure water ice drifts on top of it. Although many in the industry regarded freezing as a cumbersome and expensive technology, Prof. Witkamp demonstrated his technology at various sites using a mobile installation on the back of a truck. He showed the energy used for purification could be reduced by some 90 percent. Continued…
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Tagged with DOW, EFC, energy, freezing, separation, Witkamp..
By admin
– november 10, 2011
Clash of the Penguins – A Serious Physics Game
Student teams worked on commissioned educational games for six weeks. Last week they presented the results of this interfaculty ‘Building Serious Games’ project.
It was the first time the student teams worked with external commissioners, but project leader, Dr Rafael Bidarra (EECS), has already called this development “a magical formula”, because working on commission improved the students’ motivation and team spirit.
Continued…
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Tagged with commissioning, education, serious gaming, students..
By admin
– november 10, 2011
Engineering agency LBP|Sight has won the Vernufteling award, organised last week by NLIngenieurs and the engineers’ association KiviNiria. LBP|Sight’s acoustical floor in the Dutch Maritime Museum saves visitors from drowning in sound in the courtyard.
The courtyard is a place of pride for the fully restored and recently reopened Maritime Museum in Amsterdam. A huge glass roof has been constructed over the courtyard, with numerous fine steel beams in the form of a compass rose supporting it. The only trouble is that sound would bounce endlessly between the stone floor, the glass roof and the walls of the courtyard. Reverberation times of 8 seconds were calculated, which would result in a disastrous cacophony for guides and visitors. Continued…
Posted in Delta, Uncategorized.
Tagged with acoustics, Diemer de Vries, LBP|Insight, museum, reverberation.
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– november 10, 2011
Canals are important ingredients in the Fine Dutch Tradition. (Photo Maarten Laupman)
It’s often said that God created the Earth, and the Dutch made Holland. Now a study has been published on how they did it: very pragmatically.
Dr Fransje Hooimeijer wrote a book that most people assumed already existed: ‘The Tradition of Making Polder Cities’. It describes how civil engineering and urbanism developed hand in hand by building cities on the weak, wet and flood-prone soils of the Netherlands ever since the time of first settlements.
“It’s mostly on making the soil construction ready,” says Hooimeijer. “But people never thought it useful to document what they did, because they assumed everyone knew it all. I’ve found only one book one the topic.”
Once you start thinking about it, making the soil construction ready has many different aspects, such as water, groundwater, bearing capacity, driving in piles, and permeability of the soil. Urban design on the other hand also has numerous aspects: public green, public functions, infrastructure and integrating conflicting interests. Now imagine putting these together into the Fine Dutch Tradition, the culture that created the famous Amsterdam ring of canals, which were simultaneously the underlying structure for the urban design as well as the new waterway system. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with architecture, civil engineering, Dutch, Fransje Hooimeijer, history, Holland, polder cities, urbanism.
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– november 3, 2011
Bangkok’s city centre may be spared from heavy floods, but suburban residents want to open up the dikes to allow water out. Anger grows, but officials can do little to help.
The first thing Professor Han Vrijling does is open up an atlas, showing Thailand’s geography: a horseshoe of mountains with an elongated flat plain in the middle. Three majors streams join into the Chao Phraya River, which flows southward to the Gulf of Thailand. “All the water from the surrounding mountains collects in the flood plain and swells the river. And right there, at the mouth of the river, is Bangkok.”
No wonder then that the monsoon, which has been going on since July, has brought high waters to the Thai capital. What makes matters worse is that about 9 million people live there and that retrieval of groundwater has caused significant subsidence of the street levels there. In other words: the floods are not new, but the densely populated capital has become more vulnerable to them. Continued…
Posted in Articles, Delta.
Tagged with Bangkok, dikes, flood, Thailand, Van de Giesen, Vrijling.
By admin
– november 3, 2011
