Jaap van der Sar
Science editor
Jaap (born 1975) is a science editor at Delta. After a varied career as a journalist and all-round media professional, he can now indulge his boundless curiosity about technology and innovation to the full at Delta. Are you working on something wonderful, exciting, unique or earth-shattering? Jaap would love to hear all about it!
Army vehicles, drones and military personnel marked the start of a new collaboration in the API Hall on 1 July. The hall, which has housed large-scale research set-ups since 1977, will now be rented out to the Ministry of Defence for the development and testing of new technology in collaboration with start-ups and small businesses.
When it comes to impressive civil engineering projects, it doesn’t get much more exciting than a tunnel between the African and European continents. Tunnel boring machine manufacturer Herrenknecht studied the technical feasibility of this project on behalf of the Spanish government and concluded: “go ahead with the job.” We asked TU tunnel expert Wout Broere: is it actually possible?
As many as one in four young people is a caregiver, a role that can sometimes be extremely demanding. That is also the story of TU alumnus Simon Loose. He was a first-year student and not yet 18 when his mother suffered a brain haemorrhage. His carefree student life came to an abrupt end: “From that day on, it was all about survival: I alternated lectures with visits to the hospital and the rehabilitation centre.”
For first-year Mechanical Engineering students, a lot was at stake on Wednesday, June 10. After months of hard work, they were ready: around 700 students, divided over 112 teams with their ‘mechanical boulderer’ at the starting line. Which revolutionary machine will reach the top first? “I’m now at 28 seconds!”
What do you do when your solar cells are already so efficient that further development runs up against a limit? Stop? Or devise a new route? At the Photovoltaics Materials and Devices research group (Faculty of EEMCS), they chose option two. Professor of solar cells Olindo Isabella: “What if you stack two innovative cells on top of each other?”
Clean water from the tap? That is becoming less and less a given, according to the report Caring for Water (Zorg voor Water) by the Council for the Environment and Infrastructure. Water expert Professor Jan Peter van der Hoek explains what we can do about it: “Smart innovation can help, but tackling pollution yields the best results.”
