Prizes and In 2010, students and staff from TU Delft once again won many prizes, ranging from incentive prizes to achievement awards. You can read about some of them here. Copper from waste proves goldmine for Elemetal Elemetal BV won the ASN Bank World Prize of € 20,000 for its “extraordinary project that contributes to the sustainability of society”. Copper is becoming scarce, which means that its value is increasing. Start-up company Elemetal BV has developed a process for extracting copper from the ashes of incinerated household waste, which is often richer in copper than copper ore. Elemetal has taken out a worldwide patent on the chemical process used to recover metals from ash. This process is carried out using mobile equipment on site at the incinerator plant. The profits from selling the reclaimed copper are shared. This is a potential gold mine, as the average municipal incinerator company dumps more than € 2 millions worth of copper every year. An added advantage is that less copper is left to contaminate the soil when the ash is dumped. Eventually the young entrepreneurs Silvan Thus and Bert-Jan Kuipers hope to recover all the metals in domestic waste ash. This would also make the remaining ash suitable for re-use, such as in high-quality construction materials: upcycling at its best. Elemental has its base at YES!Delft, the centre for young entrepreneurs at TU Delft. No frozen assets for IcySolutions Technostarter IcySolutions wins Baby Tycoon Award for start-up companies in Haaglanden region. Ice baths are an ideal therapy to boost muscle recovery after intensive sports performances. But until recently it took hours for the bath to reach the right temperature. So TU Delft alumni Tarek Ghobar and Hicham Shatou came up with the IcyDip, a method for getting an ice bath to the right temperature very quickly. The next step was the IcyBath: a folding bathtub that can travel with the athletes to their competition venue. So athletes no longer need to clamber into a wheelie bin filled with water and ice cubes. The IcyBath is collapsible, lightweight and has an integrated step and seat, making it a safe and more comfortable experience, if not exactly pleasant. It did not take long for IcySolutions to reach the world top and it has already featured at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver as well as the Tour de France. Moreover, the innovative young entrepreneurs won the Baby Tycoon Award, an incentive prize for start-up companies in the Haaglanden region. Everyone in the mood at festival site Three TU Delft Master’s students won the Dutch regional prize in the European Satellite Navigation Competition organised by Kennisalliantie Delft with their mood app. The mood app is the latest festival gadget. Are you looking for someone to dance with, or maybe just a chat? Type it in on your smart phone and the arrow will point you towards other festivalgoers who are in the same mood. At the same time, the special wristband will light up so that everyone else can see what mood you’re in. This includes the organisers, who can then use the information, to decide to turn up the music for example. Ferdi de Jong, Teun Hoevenaars and Jon Reijneveld were – very appropriately – enjoying a drink together when they came up with the idea for the festival app. The ESNC prize – comprising over € 10,000 in professional support from the Netherlands Space Office, law firm De Clercq and technology service company Logica – means they can develop their idea further and market it. 40 | Highlights 2010
Organisation awards ERC Advanced Grants for two professors Two TU Delft professors have each been awarded a prestigious Advanced Investigator Grant, a personal grant from the European Research Council to help researchers who have submitted a ground-breaking and ambitious research proposal. Professor Henny Zandbergen was allocated € 2.5 million for his research into improved microscope technologies. High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy enables structures to be visualised at the atomic level. And the improved microscope technology means that scientists can simultaneously take physical measurements of what they are visualising, turning the electron microscope into a sort of nanolaboratory. Professor Andrzej Stankiewicz received € 2.3 million for his research on improving chemical reactions at the molecular level. Presentgeneration chemical reactors have poor energy efficiency and produce unnecessary waste. Professor Stankiewicz aims to improve this by gaining total control over chemical reactions at the molecular level. “Playing snooker with molecules,” is how he describes it. TU Delft wins RAI Mobility Award for second year running The Master’s specialisation in Advanced Automotive Design won the 2010 RAI Mobility Award, making this two wins in a row for TU Delft. Could we see a hat-trick in 2011? Alumni from the Master’s specialisation Advanced Automotive Design are establishing an international reputation among the world’s great car brands for their design work. The study programme has now achieved national recognition in the form of the RAI Golden Wheel, part of the 2010 RAI Mobility Award. The Dutch Minister of Finance, Jan Kees de Jager, presented the award during the annual Mobility Dinner held at the Mauritshuis. It was the second year running that TU Delft won this award: in 2009 it was presented to Wubbo Ockels for his work on sustainable mobility. What is the secret behind the TU Delft Advanced Automotive Design study programme’s success? It covers the entire process of product development, from design to product launch. This combination of a solid technical foundation and a passion for design has endeared the TU Delft designers to the automotive sector all over the world. Triumph for designer with training sword Maarten Kamphuis won the National Sport Innovation Prize with his training sword, as well as earning the title of Best TU Delft Graduate 2010. Five hundred years on, medieval European sword fighting is seeing a revival, now as a martial art. But authentic steel swords are dangerous. Safer options, such as nylon or wooden swords, are a little like playing golf with a tennis racket: not a satisfactory alternative. For his graduation project, Industrial Design Engineering student Maarten Kamphuis conceived a steel sword with rubber edges, whose blade retracts 20 cm into the handle upon contact, making it realistic yet safe. The National Sport Innovation Prize jury thought so too and awarded Maarten € 5,000, plus professional support to enable him to market his product via his own business, M_blades. His design was preceded by extensive research, including historical analysis, field work, high-speed video, a prototype, test configurations, tensile tests and computer calculations. This thorough approach earned him yet more prizes: he was named best graduate of the year for the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering and for the whole of TU Delft. 41 | Highlights 2010