The cold hard facts

Massive chunks of ice, the North Pole, freezing temperatures? That’s perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of the Arctic. Or perhaps we are now more inclined to think of melting glacial caps or changing sea currents pattern or for that matter the effects of global climate change.
Although many polar scientists continue to intensely study the changes occurring in the high Arctic, a small group of students from TU Delft’s Energy Club are doing their bit by contributing to the data collection supporting climate change research.

The sea ice cover is thinning and decreasing, although estimates of when the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free during summer months vary. There’s no consensus in the scientific community, though the downward trend is clear. Sea ice disappears either by melting or transportation. Most ice disappears when it gets carried away to the edges, outside of the Arctic basin, by sea currents and winds. This important mechanism needs to be better understood and monitored to study the influences on climate change and global warming.
Every year polar scientists head to the polar region to work in the field for weeks and months, measuring sea ice thickness and dynamics. The efforts involved are enormous and only a few areas are explored regularly. The Cold Facts programme adds capacity to the data collection by providing instruments and protocols to the polar explorers who travel to remote areas where hardly anyone comes.

The Cold Facts is mentored by Marc Cornelissen, a Dutch polar explorer who works with the World Wildlife Foundation and other polar scientists. He asked Delft’s Energy Club to coordinate the design and production of an unmanned, lightweight weather station, an important asset for his programme. Polar explorers can deploy such stations in scientific ‘white spots’, which are areas in the ocean that have layers of sea ice on which weather stations can be positioned. Once deployed the station provides meteorological and daily positional reports, actually monitoring sea ice movements and the key factors driving such movements: air pressure and wind.
The station transmits its data via satellite as it drifts along with the ice flows. Cornelissen and others have made previous models, but there is room for improvement. What Cornelissen wants is a station that’s lighter, more reliable and easier to deploy. This new station will incorporate and upgrade already tested electronics, building upon known transmitters and sensors. The controller, power supply and mechanical construction are to be redesigned as well. All areas where Delft’s student project team lends a helping hand.

Creativity
The Cold Facts team is a multidisciplinary international team comprised of students from mechanical engineering, sustainable energy and technology, electrical, electronics and industrial design engineering. One aspect of the project that binds and attracts them all is the adventure of making something that will be deployed on the North Pole.

The team has been working on the project since January 2011 and plans to finish it by late April 2011, meeting each week in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering to discuss the project’s progress among themselves and with Cornelissen. During these meeting the students brainstorm, present ideas, thrash out details of problems and discuss models of physical prototypes they’ve built. Professor Christos Spitas and Dr Mohammadreza
Rajabalinejad from the Industrial Design Engineering faculty also supervise the project and provide valuable inputs.

Although the students are extremely excited by the thought of polar travel, the project’s limited resources wouldn’t allow for it, so for now the students do their part from relatively balmy Delft, but always with the North Pole’s extreme weather conditions firmly in mind.

“Working for polar expeditions and for extreme climates is challenging,” says Gaspard Bos, a Dutch student from Industrial Design engineering. “The project’s a nice combination of a sustainable cause and an opportunity to really come up with an innovative weather station that involves lots of engineering for an extreme climate.”

Cornelissen, a TU Delft alumnus, is counting on the students’ creativity and is excited about the way the project has shaped up thus far. His ultimate goal is to devise a well-designed, meaningful technical solution for a weather station that he’s been working on since 2004. There are also plans in place to involve and pitch the Cold Facts programme to other corporate sponsors, thus
raising awareness and funding for more research in the Arctic.
For the Delft-bound students, visualizing the prototype is an especially difficult nut to crack, as the only available data comes pictures and videos Cornelissen takes at the artic locations. The team comes up with wild concepts but then must always critically examine the prototype idea in light of the harsh weather conditions, threats of polar bears, and ease of deployment by the polar explorers – all unique challenges to a North Pole project.
Industrial engineering student, Amit Gudadhe, says: “The biggest advantage for us is having a client like Cornelissen, who has been completely involved in the team. He’s always ready to extend a helping hand and has lots to tell us based on his experience. Learning from previous models and existing technology and looking at new state of art technologies is also important.”
The students know the complexity of the problems very well, but perhaps equally important for them is being in a team where they learn firsthand about the benefits of the cross-functionality of disciplines, while also learning how to deal and even benefit from the varied and sometimes conflicting opinions that arise when confronted with different aspects of the project.
“There’s lots of diversity in the team, which is often helpful, especially in this case, as lots of specialized knowledge in various fields is required,” says team member Brhamesh Alipuria. “We have people whose opinions are valued more when dealing with certain specialised knowledge, but the final decisions are taken as a team. Till now it’s been easy to coordinate.”

Exploring the Arctic on foot is a dream that all the project team members nurture, but for now it will be their brainchild weather station that will be the traveller.

Delta, 21-02-2008
Richard Hendriks received his Ph.D. cum laude this week for a new method to filter background noise. 

Everyone who uses a cell phone at a train station knows how annoying the noise of loudly passing trains can be, as it’s virtually impossible to make oneself heard on the phone. Background noise causes similar problems for people with hearing aids. When hearing aid wearers are at a party, for example, it’s difficult for them to hear what the person talking to them is saying, because of all the noise in the room. Dr Richard Hendriks was irritated by these problems and intrigued about how technology could fix them.
For his PhD thesis, Hendriks developed a filter that reduces background noise: “We developed an algorithm that suppresses sounds that change very fast. When for example a car or train drives by, the volume of the sound increases and then fades away. At present it takes a few seconds for hearing devices to detect a train, and by the time it adjusts, the train has already passed. My algorithm detects a passing vehicle earlier and adjusts faster, so it makes a difference.”
The filter could also reduce some of the sound of ambient noise at a party. “But it’s very hard to reduce all the noise,” he says. “It’s all about voices. The sound of the background noise is very similar to the voice of someone who’s talking to you that you still would like to hear.”
After Hendriks received his PhD cum laude in 2008, he further developed his filter in Denmark. He worked in Copenhagen at Oticon, a company that develops hearing aids and works together with TU Delft. “For my algorithm, lots of calculations must be done. That was difficult, because there is only a small processor inside hearing aids. I therefore had to adjust the algorithm. I simplified it, without consequences for the performance. Now we are looking into using the filter inside a hearing aid. We still have to test it and certify it, but I think that in a couple of years the filter will be used in hearing devices.”
Hendriks returned to TU Delft a year ago and is now an assistant professor in the multimedia signal processing group of the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. Recently he received a prestigious Veni grant for young scientists to develop a system that improves the sound of a voice, instead of only reducing the ambient noise. Hendriks: “That research could also make it easier for people who are talking on the phone with someone who’s at a train station, for example. When a train passes they could still hear the one who’s talking, because the sound of the voice is improved.”

Massive chunks of ice, the North Pole, freezing temperatures? That’s perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of the Arctic. Or perhaps we are now more inclined to think of melting glacial caps or changing sea currents pattern or for that matter the effects of global climate change.
Although many polar scientists continue to intensely study the changes occurring in the high Arctic, a small group of students from TU Delft’s Energy Club are doing their bit by contributing to the data collection supporting climate change research.

The sea ice cover is thinning and decreasing, although estimates of when the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free during summer months vary. There’s no consensus in the scientific community, though the downward trend is clear. Sea ice disappears either by melting or transportation. Most ice disappears when it gets carried away to the edges, outside of the Arctic basin, by sea currents and winds. This important mechanism needs to be better understood and monitored to study the influences on climate change and global warming.
Every year polar scientists head to the polar region to work in the field for weeks and months, measuring sea ice thickness and dynamics. The efforts involved are enormous and only a few areas are explored regularly. The Cold Facts programme adds capacity to the data collection by providing instruments and protocols to the polar explorers who travel to remote areas where hardly anyone comes.

The Cold Facts is mentored by Marc Cornelissen, a Dutch polar explorer who works with the World Wildlife Foundation and other polar scientists. He asked Delft’s Energy Club to coordinate the design and production of an unmanned, lightweight weather station, an important asset for his programme. Polar explorers can deploy such stations in scientific ‘white spots’, which are areas in the ocean that have layers of sea ice on which weather stations can be positioned. Once deployed the station provides meteorological and daily positional reports, actually monitoring sea ice movements and the key factors driving such movements: air pressure and wind. 

The station transmits its data via satellite as it drifts along with the ice flows. Cornelissen and others have made previous models, but there is room for improvement. What Cornelissen wants is a station that’s lighter, more reliable and easier to deploy. This new station will incorporate and upgrade already tested electronics, building upon known transmitters and sensors. The controller, power supply and mechanical construction are to be redesigned as well. All areas where Delft’s student project team lends a helping hand.

Creativity
The Cold Facts team is a multidisciplinary international team comprised of students from mechanical engineering, sustainable energy and technology, electrical, electronics and industrial design engineering. One aspect of the project that binds and attracts them all is the adventure of making something that will be deployed on the North Pole.

The team has been working on the project since January 2011 and plans to finish it by late April 2011, meeting each week in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering to discuss the project’s progress among themselves and with Cornelissen. During these meeting the students brainstorm, present ideas, thrash out details of problems and discuss models of physical prototypes they’ve built. Professor Christos Spitas and Dr Mohammadreza
Rajabalinejad from the Industrial Design Engineering faculty also supervise the project and provide valuable inputs.

Although the students are extremely excited by the thought of polar travel, the project’s limited resources wouldn’t allow for it, so for now the students do their part from relatively balmy Delft, but always with the North Pole’s extreme weather conditions firmly in mind.

“Working for polar expeditions and for extreme climates is challenging,” says Gaspard Bos, a Dutch student from Industrial Design engineering. “The project’s a nice combination of a sustainable cause and an opportunity to really come up with an innovative weather station that involves lots of engineering for an extreme climate.”

Cornelissen, a TU Delft alumnus, is counting on the students’ creativity and is excited about the way the project has shaped up thus far. His ultimate goal is to devise a well-designed, meaningful technical solution for a weather station that he’s been working on since 2004. There are also plans in place to involve and pitch the Cold Facts programme to other corporate sponsors, thus raising awareness and funding for more research in the Arctic.
For the Delft-bound students, visualizing the prototype is an especially difficult nut to crack, as the only available data comes pictures and videos Cornelissen takes at the artic locations. The team comes up with wild concepts but then must always critically examine the prototype idea in light of the harsh weather conditions, threats of polar bears, and ease of deployment by the polar explorers – all unique challenges to a North Pole project.

Industrial engineering student, Amit Gudadhe, says: “The biggest advantage for us is having a client like Cornelissen, who has been completely involved in the team. He’s always ready to extend a helping hand and has lots to tell us based on his experience. Learning from previous models and existing technology and looking at new state of art technologies is also important.” The students know the complexity of the problems very well, but perhaps equally important for them is being in a team where they learn firsthand about the benefits of the cross-functionality of disciplines, while also learning how to deal and even benefit from the varied and sometimes conflicting opinions that arise when confronted with different aspects of the project. 

“There’s lots of diversity in the team, which is often helpful, especially in this case, as lots of specialized knowledge in various fields is required,” says team member Brhamesh Alipuria. “We have people whose opinions are valued more when dealing with certain specialised knowledge, but the final decisions are taken as a team. Till now it’s been easy to coordinate.”

Exploring the Arctic on foot is a dream that all the project team members nurture, but for now it will be their brainchild weather station that will be the traveller.