Tag Archives: TU Delft

This V-shaped aircraft is energy efficient and has double the cabin space!

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Eliminating the distinction between a plane’s cabin and its wings, the Flying-V by Justus Benad assumes a unique V-shaped aircraft design that integrates the passenger cabin, the cargo hold, and the fuel tanks right into the wings.

Created as a part of his thesis project, TU Delft student Justus Benad designed the Flying-V to be a highly energy-efficient long-distance airplane. The Flying-V relies on a wider wing-span than most traditional aircrafts, but offers double the cabin space in the process. Think of it as having the same wing-span and seating capacity as an Airbus A350, but being only half as long. Its improved aerodynamic design helps reduce the aircraft’s overall weight, bringing down its fuel consumption by as much as 20%, making the Flying-V incredibly efficient for its capacity!

The interiors of the Flying-V are mindfully designed for its 314 passengers. The V-shaped cabin space comes with an unusually wide cross-section towards the front, quite similar to the MAVERIC concept from Airbus. Designed to help distribute weight efficiently, the cabin is fitted with experimental lightweight fixtures that provide a comfortable experience for the passengers. The cabin’s unique V-shape also provides the ability to introduce as many as 4 seating options: lounge chairs, group seating, individual seats and collapsible beds.

A team of engineers, technicians, and students at TU Delft built a scale model of the Flying-V with a wingspan of 3.06 meters with the plan to test-fly it during the year to measure its stability when cruising at low speeds and to calculate the right angle for take-off and landing.

Designer: Justus Benad (TU Delft)

Image Credits: TU Delft and Anton Weaver

Turning plastic pollution into design solution!

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The guys at The New Raw make a rather interesting point. The one material property of plastic we consider a benefit is in fact a curse. Plastic is designed to last long, but its usage cycle falls vastly short of its actual lifespan. A mere wrapper, bottle or garbage bag has a usage cycle ranging from a couple of hours to a couple of months, yet this very material has a lifespan of anywhere from 500 to 1000 years, making its way into landfills and the oceans because it was designed to outlive its need.

The Print Your City project was spawned out of the need to extend the usage cycle of plastic by developing a technology to turn waste plastic back into a raw material. The New Raw transform waste plastic into public furniture using 3D printing, not just extending the life of plastic and minimizing waste as a result, but doing it in a way that doesn’t necessarily make the end-result look “recycled”, but rather a well designed, beautifully manufactured product.

According to The New Raw, individual citizens of Amsterdam generate up to 25 kilograms of plastic waste annually. The Print Your City XXX Bench, one of the first in the series of products uses 50 of waste plastic (an amount generated annually by two such citizens) to develop a bench with a unique, iconic aesthetic, the Amsterdam XXX branding, and the ability to seat up to four people!

The New Raw’s approach to recycling involves visualizing waste as a resource and raw material Their hope is to turn waste generated by the residents of Amsterdam into products that are designed to serve its citizens and use plastic’s long life-span as an advantage!

Designers: The New Raw & Aectual. (Supported by TU Delft)

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A Lean Mean Cleaning Machine

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The vacuum cleaner made cleaning easier. It never made cleaning more efficient. In most parts of the world, the broom is still the most effective for cleaning one’s home. Its popularity stems from the fact that it’s light, easily maneuverable, adaptive and has a pretty far reach. Most vacuum cleaners are either small and portable or large and clunky. Not the Philips Broom, however. Designed by students at TU Delft in partnership with Philips, the Philips Vacuum Broom strikes the sweet spot, giving you the feeling of working with a broom combined with the technological prowess of a powerful vacuum cleaner. The solution is pretty much a single stick that houses the entire vacuum cleaning unit along with a battery, giving you complete mobility. The dust sack can be found right underneath the display, well within access, allowing you to empty and clean the vacuum broom out without hassle. Get this, the vacuum broom even comes with a detachable nozzle, allowing it to become a short, portable dust-buster style vacuum cleaner. How’s that for two birds with one stone!

Designers: Lorenz Bauer, Priska van Binsbergen, Tine Hoogterp, Renate Hulst, Debbie Rouw & Karthik Mahadevan.

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A Metal-printed Masterpiece

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Although 3D printing has just picked up, there are quite a few 3D printed bicycle designs out there. None, however, are made of steel. None of them also look as beautiful as the Arc Bike. Created by the students at TU Delft, based in The Netherlands, the Arc bike has an intricately detailed bike frame made to look like it was woven, rather than printed. You really need to watch the video below to see what goes into creating this work of art, or should I say work of Arc!

Designer: Arc Bicycle Team (TU Delft)

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Ambulance Drone Flies In to Provide First Aid

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Ambulance Drone

If ground robots prove helpful in situations when involving humans would be hazardous for their health, flying drones might come in handy in emergency situations where the time factor has an utmost importance.

Invented by Alec Momont of TU Delft’s Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, this ambulance drone could be the solution for areas where traffic represents a real problem. Conventional ambulances are often delayed by traffic jams, and in an emergency situation, a few minutes could signify the difference between life and death.

Unlike the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator drone, which is an UFV used by the army, the ambulance drone will have the exactly opposite purpose: not taking lives, but saving them. The way it works is quite simple. When someone calls the emergency services, their smartphone location is saved and an ambulance drone is deployed right away. There are plenty of scenarios when this couldn’t work. In tunnels or elevators, where the mobile signal is not that great, not only finding the location of the caller would be a problem, but also trying to reach the emergency services.

“Some 800,000 people suffer a cardiac arrest in the EU every year, and only 8% survive,” pointed out Momont. “The main reason for this is the relatively long response time of the emergency services (approx. 10 minutes), while brain death and fatalities occur within 4 to 6 minutes. The ambulance drone can get a defibrillator to a patient inside a 12 km zone within one minute. This response speed increases the chance of survival following a cardiac arrest from 8% to 80%.”

Momont says that the ambulance drones are still in the development stage, and an usable version of them should be ready in about 5 years. Mind you, they won’t come cheap, and at $20,000 a piece, I’m not sure many hospitals will be able to buy them.

The ambulance drone could have plenty of downsides. The emergency services would have to make sure that the drone is charged at all times so as not to fail midway to the emergency. Secondly, the drone’s propellers represent a danger on their own (a man killed himself long ago while controlling his drone, remember?), so they would have to be controlled with great precision so that the UFV doesn’t do even more damage.

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