Four major European research grants for TU/e Cursor introduces

6
Biweekly magazine of the Eindhoven University of Technology
14 November 2013 | year 56
For the latest news: www.cursor.tue.nl/en and follow @TUeCursor_news on
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TU/e students want to build
largest ice dome ever
More news on www.cursor.tue.nl/en
Four major European research
grants for TU/e
Thursday 7 November 2013 - Two graduate students at Built Environment have
decided they want to build the largest-ever dome made of ice. Jorrit Hijl and Roel
Pluijmen will leave for Finland in late December to start working on a dome with a
thirty-meter diameter at the base, helped by volunteers. They’ll be using ice that’s
been reinforced with wood fiber.
The past months involved thorough research of the structure, design and construction
of the ice dome. The construction method will involve a ring of anchors with a rope net
attached to it. Hijl: “We’ll inflate a large hot air balloon of sorts so the net rises, and then,
layer by layer, we’ll spray a mixture of snow, water, and fiber over the dome shape.”
Tuesday 12 November 2013 - Four researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) will receive Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council (ERC)
amounting to a maximum of 2.75 million euros each. Their research focuses on new
kinds of nanowires, optimizing fluidized bed reactors, new algorithmic methods and
the behavior of droplets on soft materials. The grants go to the following four researchers at TU/e: prof.dr.ir. Erik Bakkers, prof.dr.ir. Jacco Snoeijer (both working at Applied
Physics), dr.ir. Johan Padding (Chemical Engineering and Chemistry) and dr. Nikhil
Bansal (Mathematics and Computer Science).
Eindhoven technology
students in reality soap
Thursday 7 November 2013 - There’s
a reality soap series in the making:
Campus Eindhoven, starring six
technology students from Eindhoven.
The soap will premiere on network
Omroep Brabant in early 2014.
The university will put forward
three of the total of six reality
show students. The idea Omroep
Brabant, TU/e and Fontys have
in mind with Campus Eindhoven
is to put technical study programs
in the limelight, and put Eindhoven
on the map as a real student city.
Clmn
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calendar
Tuesday 29 Oct
ober 20
13 - Want
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and when the
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ant to stay in th
e
loop for intere
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or plan to atte
nd a fun studen
t
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mpus and in th
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Drop us a line
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Sit back, relax and enjoy your flight
That’s all I did over the past weekend. It’s been the most tiring yet most
satisfying journey in a long time: travelling back home after almost a year.
Yes, I’m writing this column all the way from India.
This summer I boarded numerous flights to European destinations.
I booked most flights with cheap European airlines, and flight time was
never more than a few hours. I remember how excited and nervous I was
boarding an intercontinental flight for the first couple of times. However,
when I booked my flight to India it seemed no different from any other flight.
But soon it hit me that intercontinental flights are a different experience
altogether. The difference could be felt at the airport already, where
security was stricter, and asked more questions about immigration.
But the nicest part of the experience came on board. How could I have
forgotten about the food? It was so nice to receive delicious in-flight
meals, including a menu-card and drink options. It was also good to
have a personal TV screen to watch all movies that had been on my wish.
I wonder if introducing these facilities on cheap European flights would
increase ticket prices too much.
The best feeling was when I found the flight for Kolkata that was waiting
for me to board. Many people in line were from this part of India, and they
were speaking my mother tongue, Bengali. It was even more wonderful to
see all the foreign tourists boarding the same plane, anticipating and
excited to travel beautiful India. Suddenly I felt extremely proud of my
country and I looked forward to seeing my ‘City of Joy’ and my family once
again.
Bipashyee
Ghosh
of Innovatio , Master student
n Sciences
20 | Focus
Text | Norbine Schalij
Photos | Bart van Overbeeke
Illustration | Sandor Paulus
Next Tuesday, November 19, will be World
Toilet Day. Funny though this may seem,
the intention is quite serious. Sanitation is
a human right. One in three people on this
globe does not have access to a toilet. In
order to draw attention to this and to break
the taboo on toilets, the United Nations
embraced the World Toilet Day - created in
2001 by the World Toilet Organization.
While Cursor is aware that TU/e students
and staff members have no reason to
grumble about their sanitary facilities, it
still catches them doing so. So let’s plunge
into this issue.
Toilets for the disabled | There are 25 toilets
for disabled persons in 23 buildings. The one in
Laplace is the most unusual; it has a very special seat.
This 1,200-euro toilet seat sprays and dries the
buttocks and was mounted many years ago for
a (now former) staff member who had no arms.
14 November 2013
Do you give a
shit?
Dirty | The dirtiest toilets can be found in
the Bunker. Demos has stainless steel urinals,
which are extremely vandalism-proof. SSRE
also has dirty toilets.
Royal toilet | 1,200 euro for
a toilet seat is costly, but 25,000
guilders for a temporary toilet
inside a temporary building is
an exorbitant amount. Or so the
Court of Audit thought in 1958.
The year before, a Royal toilet
costing that amount was built for
Queen Juliana at the Paviljoen
which she was to open. The
ladies-in-waiting who came to
size up the situation in advance
demanded a suitable location
where the Queen could freshen
up. Simple sanitary fittings
intended to be used by students
will not come up to the Royal
standard, as the ladies-in-waiting
intimated discreetly, says ‘the
small TU/e encyclopedia’. After
Queen Juliana’s visit, the toilet
was removed again. The THE was
reprimanded for this and never
did so again. Nowadays, whenever
a member of the Royal family
needs to go to the toilet during
a visit to TU/e, this will probably
take place in the Auditorium.
It has an entrance for
‘distinguished visitors’.
Focus | 21
See for more news www.cursor.tue.nl/en
“The things you find in toilet bowls! Glass,
complete lavatory paper rolls, cans and
even T-shirts and socks. I see chewing gum
in lots of urinals”, says Ad van Rooij from
Real Estate Management. Cleaning crews
find sanitary napkins in the bowls, poop
on the wall, on the side of the bowl and
on the floor. Vomit is another familiar
sight on Friday mornings.
Squatting
closets |
TU/e has a
squatting closet
for ladies and one
for gents, built
especially for those
international
students and staff
members who just
cannot get used to
a toilet with a bowl
and seat. As soon
as a squatting toilet
gets blocked, it is
locked and is not
opened again until
Imtech has solved
the problem.
Urinals | Most urinals come with a button that the
toilet user himself needs to press. Some men tend to
forget this. In Laplace, Auditorium and Potentiaal you
get urinals that flush automatically.
Foto | Jessica van Lier
Personal hygiene | At TU/e soap dispensers are pressed 2,303,002 times every year by
Paper | Every year 46,608,064 sheets of toilet
paper are used at TU/e. A meticulous survey was
conducted to select this paper in 2011. As there
were frequent blockages of the sewage system
at TU/e, both the sewage system and the paper
were examined. In 2011 Martine de Graaf (Internal
Affairs) and Cor Smits (Real Estate Management)
tested various kinds of paper from several manufacturers for their pulverizability. They put the
sheets into bottles of water and shook them until
they knew whether the paper was pulverized.
Since January 1, 2012, we have had 100% cellulose
paper instead of recycled paper, because the
latter contains a lot of glue that will not dissolve.
As a result you get clogs which block the system.
Cellulose paper is thin, single-layer paper.
“The softer, the more paper people will use.”
Imtech also solved the bottlenecks in the
sewage system: it widened bends,
replaced T-pieces and especially:
the urinary calculus was removed.
people washing their hands. Yet 1 in 3 Dutchmen do not wash their hands after having been
to the toilet, according to the British research bureau Opinion Matters (September 2013).
It also calculated that Dutch employees spend more than 33.5 hours per year in the toilets
at their place of work. During sanitary stops 1 in 7 Dutchmen use their mobile phones,
1 in 30 read newspapers and 1 out of 20 surf the web.
Bowls | At TU/e there are around seven hundred toilet
bowls and more than two hundred and fifty urinals.
TU/e prefers a white bowl with a black lidless seat. These
form the vast majority, particularly in the buildings that
were erected until the 1970s. See Hoofdgebouw, Potentiaal,
Paviljoen, Corona and Impuls. In the two following decades
Gemini (north and south), Traverse, IPO and Laplace were
built, where you occasionally see a white seat. In even newer
buildings you find toilets designed by the architects.
Toilet trivia:
Number of toilet bowls at TU/e:
Number of urinals:
Number of toilet paper holders at TU/e: Number of soap dispensers: Square meters of sanitation floor space: Sanitary napkins containers: Incontinence pads boxes: Hand towel roll dispensers: Number of hand dryers: Urinary calculus | In the age when it was in fashion to save water -this is the mid-1990s- the quantity of
flushing water was reduced from 9 to 6 liters. In 2012 TU/e reversed this adjustment. “To prevent urinary calculus,
which blocks the sewage system, a substantial water flow is required”, explains Ad van Rooij, contract director of
mechanical engineering contracts with Real Estate Management. He is responsible for climate installations and
sanitation. Van Rooij is the man to turn to for the construction, alteration and maintenance of toilets.
Sewage system | Water discharged from TU/e is divided into a clean water sewage system and a
foul water sewage drain. The first system discharges rainwater via roof gutters, rain pipes and street
inlets into the river Dommel. The second system is used for the water coming from toilets and wash
basins in the buildings.
In the Paviljoen the toilets are at a great distance from the main sewer, which hampers their flushing.
When they do not get flushed frequently enough, the solid matter to be discharged gets stuck. For this
purpose an automatic flushing mechanism has been installed, which flushes all toilets every two hours.
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22 | Research
14 November 2013
4 burning questions
1
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What
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3
2
Wh
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Christian Berendsen | Applied Physics
4
What person,
technology, or device
has been essential
for your research?
does
How
efit
n
e
b
ty
socie ur work?
yo
from
Unstable liquid films
1 | cover The cover shows how a thin layer of liquid dewets, which 3 | essential During my research project we and the team of the
is the spontaneous appearance of dry spots that continue to grow and
develop a pattern of droplets. The microscopic image shows a liquid film
moving underneath an airknive (a curtain of fast flowing air). Using the
colored interference lines we can measure the film thickness: in this
case, approximately 60 nanometers.
2 | parties Conducting experiments and simulations, I’ve researched
how to control the breakup of thin liquid films. By deforming a liquid layer
using air jets, lasers or static electricity, I can influence the distribution
of residual droplets.
TU/e Equipment & Prototype Center developed a spincoater with an
open axis of rotation. This device can deform a deposited liquid film,
and measure its height profile at the same time using a high-speed camera.
4 | society benefit In the immersion lithography machines of
People | 23
See for more news www.cursor.tue.nl/en
And how are things in Daejon?
More and more TU/e students go abroad for their studies to follow courses, internships or a doctorate path.
What is it like to find your way in a new country? Students tell their stories.
Get your phone out of your pocket. If it doesn’t say Samsung on the front, there’s probably an apple
on the back, but even then it’s full of Korean high-tech. Reason enough to honor the Korean Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon with a visit. The feeling’s mutual, because as
a European you’re an interesting subject just as well: the Korean’s English may not be characterized
by a wide vocabulary, but handsome is in there, for sure.
Students here may dedicate a lot of time to their studies, but their efficiency is questionable at times.
I take three courses at KAIST. It feels like being back at high school: homework, quizzes, obligatory
presence and actual classrooms. Since investing time in your courses is a big deal at university here,
doing so makes you pass the course, usually. The remainder of the time I have left is spent on both
fun and cultural activities, of course.
Being an interesting mix between Eastern and Western culture, South Korea has a lot to offer. Fish is
gutted on the street and monks bow for Buddha in beautiful temples that are surpassed in beauty
only by the fall colors in the mountains where they are situated. By contrast, most average Koreans
live in indistinguishable high-rises. Most students, including myself, live in either male or female
dorms. The absence of a kitchen forces you to eat in a restaurant and taste new meals every day, but
that’s not an issue at all. Pigs skin, the fourth stomach of a cow, chicken heart - I can recommend
them all. Still, the idea of savoring the flavor of bitterballen at the TU/e New Year’s reception on
January 6 once again is appealing as well.
collaboration partner ASML, water is used to improve the resolution. At
high scan speeds, this water is left behind as a thin layer on the wafer
and breaks up into droplets. One of the things my study yielded was a
way to scan faster without losing water. This idea has now been patented
by ASML, and can help increase the production speed of these machines.
The study may also be useful for improving coating processes.
Jip de
s
t
u
ort,
d
Manag ent OpK
ement erations
and L
ogistics
Would you also like to write an article about your time
abroad? Please send an email to [email protected].
Read more stories online: www.cursor.tue.nl/en
Sonia Gupta | Applied Physics
Preventing salt damage
Life after TU/e
Name: Timur Bagautdinov
Place of Birth: Moscow, Russia
Date of Birth: August 31, 1989
Studied at TU/e: 2011-2013. Master of Computer Science
Current position: Pursuing a PhD in Computer Vision Laboratory at École
Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
1 | cover The cover page presents an example of the effectiveness 3 | essential
of an inhibitor that promotes salt crystallization outside the brick. This
helps to reduce salt damage to World Heritage Sites like the Coliseum.
2 | parties Many historic structures and stone monuments worldwide are in a bad state due to salts. Salt damage occurs when growing
salt crystals exert pressure the pore walls, resulting in cracks and sometimes disintegration of parts of the material. My research goal was to
understand the salt crystallization processes inside porous building
materials, and to test the use of a crystallization inhibitor as a preventive
method against salt damage. We defined efficient ways (i.e. by spraying)
and optimal environmental conditions to improve the functionality of the
crystallization inhibitor. It has been proven that the inhibitor reduces the
amount of crystallized salt inside the material and could therefore be
effective against salt damage.
Rob Wijnhoven | Electrical Engineering
1 | cover I put an intelligent surveillance camera analyzing a video
image on the cover. The intelligence is symbolized by the brains in the
camera, which are connected to a vision processor that contains the software to analyze the images. The camera detects several objects in the
image, including cars, ships, and people.
2 | parties Usually, a camera simply records without ‘knowing’ what
it sees. My algorithms analyze the image and detect objects belonging
to predetermined categories like cars. People may be able to analyze
images very well (and that may make it seem simple), but there still
aren’t any marketed systems that are able to detect objects robustly.
We used a specially designed Nuclear Magnetic
Resonance (NMR) set-up that can measure various salt ions (H, Na, Li)
together. This powerful set-up has been indispensable to gain complete
information about salt crystallization and the moisture/ion transport
processes inside a real porous material.
4 | society benefit The fundamental knowledge gained during
Why did you opt for TU/e and how do you look back?
TU/e is known for its high-quality computer science program. The Netherla
nds
is a nice country, and everyone speaks English. TU/e is fine in terms
of academia,
but I wish there had been fewer courses and more research, or a broader
selection of
courses. People (both fellow students and professors) have been exceptio
nally cool.
the inhibitor project will help us to understand the mystery behind salt
damage mechanisms. On top of that, the knowledge will be applied in
practice for restoration purposes. Over the next month we’re going to do
a case study on 17th-century masonry in ‘De Waag’ in Amsterdam. This
building has been affected by salt damage severely.
How did the job search go?
It was pretty hard to find a PhD program at the institutions of my preferen
ce,
but TU/e professors have been wonderful in recommending places to
go.
Was the fact you’re not Dutch an advantage or disadvantage in finding
a job?
Although I wasn’t looking for a position in the Netherlands, in the academ
ic world it
doesn’t seem to matter at all. I heard from fellow students that for some
companies
(especially consultancy) knowing Dutch is important. But nationality
doesn’t matter
much; it’s mostly about language.
Intelligent surveillance cameras
3 | essential The most indispensable device during my research
project must have been the coffee maker! A good experiment starts off
with the aroma of freshly-brewed filter coffee. Apart from all the caffeine,
I’m very grateful to my colleagues and the students I supervised during
the project. Implementing algorithms for several clients and project
partners has been extremely insightful and has resulted in the purely
academic framework actually working in practice as well.
4 | society benefit My work is already being used in a number
of systems: for the fully automatic detection and monitoring of ships in
the Rotterdam Harbor, and for analyzing major people flow at events like
GLOW and Mysteryland. The latter system has proven its worth in crowd
management, optimizing flow and safety.
Is this the job you hoped for?
Yes, very much so. Doing research is challenging and fun.
What happens to international
students after they graduate
from TU/e? Do they go job
hunting in the Netherlands,
pack their bags and explore
the world, or return to their
home countries? International
TU/e graduates talk about
their lives after TU/e.
What are your plans for the future?
To finish my PhD, and make sure it will be really cool.
What advice would you give current students?
Think twice about what you really want to do with your life. TU/e is a
great school
full of smart people, and it can open any door anywhere if you work hard
enough.
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Woensdag
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auditievideo’s, 25 de tenstrijd is weer van start gegaan. De jur
9 besten gaan met huelnemers werden uitgenodigd voor de sey ontving 40
en Rundfunk staan opn try-out de theaters in. Nabil Aoulad Ay lecties en de
in de Blauwe Zaal van 20 november op uitnodiging van Studiuad, Aron Elstak
m Generale
de TU/e.
Entree: Studenten gra
http://www.studium tis, anderen 5 euro
generale-eindhoven.n
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21
Thursday
November,
10.30-11.30h,
Ceres 0.31,
TU/e-campus
Lecture univ
ersity profes
sor
Maarten Ste
inbuch
Maarten Steinb
to give a lectur uch is the third university pr
ofessor
Title: Caring cae in the serie of ICMS.
Event languagers and curing robots.
: English
Entrance fee: no
http://www.tu ne
e.nl/icms
23
Saturday
November,
18.00h, Kan
aalstraat 6,
Eindhoven
Diwali - Fe
stival of Lig
hts
Dinsdag
Voorlic
26 novembe
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TINT and CO
Diwali is the SMOS are organizing th
celebration, festival of lights that’s mis years Diwali festival.
brilliance, anwhich literally illuminat arked by four days of
we’ll offer a d dazzles all with its joy.es the country with its
and a lot of p3-course meal for only 5 During this Diwali even
euros, music
eople!
t
, dance
Entrance fee:
https://www 5 euro (students) 8 euro
.facebook.co
m/events/42(other)
50382042851
36
r, 17.30-1
9
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microfluidmodellering, softrensvlak van mon spannend
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.00h,
November, 10.00-17
Monday
pus
Tema-veld, TU/e-cam
25
nt:
Intermate Big Eve
Paintballing
of
Paintballing Because
the sixth lustrum of d
Intermate, we organize
ll
a super cool paintba o
Event for everyone wh
wants to join!
Entrance fee: none te.nl/
http://www.interma m-big-event-paintballen
activiteit/2013/lustru
-22.45h,
20.00
November,
7
2
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Wedn
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November an
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Rock play RENers, organizes a gran sity terrain, 20 times in the university,
TU/e and oth menlab on the univer ents and ex-students of invited to
the Hogestro013. Together with studplayed. You are cordially
December 2 rock play RENT will be
the famous spectacle of the year!
attend this
age: English
Event langue: 17,50
ebsite
Entrance fe ieuwetheater.nl/rent/w
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et
/h
http:/
Rock play