TU alumnus wins Wubbo Ockels Innovation Audience Award

Michiel Kruijff studied aerospace engineering, and Ockels was his thesis and PhD supervisor. Now Kruijff has won the audience award of the Wubbo Ockels Innovation Award with ZemQuest. This company is working on a sustainable way to store energy with the use of aluminium. Kruijff: “Diesel is dirty, and lithium-ion batteries are great for delivering power, but they are not suitable for long ranges or for transporting energy compactly. Aluminium contains a great deal of electrical energy. With aluminium, you can transport 25 times as much energy in a single container, and in battery form, you can make a vehicle run five times longer.”

The company uses aluminium as fuel in a fuel cell. “A bit like diesel in a diesel generator or hydrogen in a hydrogen cell. The oxidation reaction causes the material to rust, so most aluminium batteries can only be used once. However, we have devised a way to automatically supply our fuel cell with fresh aluminium and capture the rusted material so that it can later be remelted into aluminium without emissions. This makes it – hopefully – both economically viable and sustainable.”

Rebellious ideas

What was it like to win the audience award? “Absolutely fantastic. We were in the final with nine other appealing, amazingly good ideas, so to be chosen by the audience is a great honor and means a lot.” The fact that it is the Wubbo Ockels Prize makes it extra special for Kruijff. “Wubbo was not only my PhD supervisor, but also my graduation supervisor thirty years ago. Together with my colleague Erik van der Heide, we were pretty much his first students, and he therefore gave us a lot of his time and – often rebellious – ideas.”

‘Immediately after graduating, we started our own company to make space travel more sustainable’

Ockels was the founder of innovative projects such as the Superbus and the Laddermolen (the precursor to energy-generating kites), and was involved in student projects such as the Nuna solar car and the solar boat. In short, he was a creative mind who knew how to get things done. An attitude that Kruijff has adopted. “Right after graduating, we started our own company and began building satellites to make space travel more sustainable, a bit like Newspace avant garde. I have always remained an entrepreneur.”

Kruijff still makes grateful use of Ockels’ insights and sums it up: “For new ideas, you have to go to young people; end your day with something fun and don’t finish it right away; it’s okay to be wrong as long as you remain optimistic; as an engineer, you have to be creative, show initiative and responsibility; always make an obvious mistake so that critics can focus on that; and I could go on and on.”

Wubbo Ockels passed away in 2014. “ZemQuest is an initiative that Wubbo himself unfortunately did not live to see, so having the link through the Wubbo Ockels Innovation Award completes the (sustainable) circle.”