Peacekeeping missions often take place at remote locations, requiring the army to have a large supply of spare parts on site to keep everything running. Dutch researcher Bram Westerweel comes to the conclusion that taking a 3D printer on a mission to print parts can save hundreds of thousands of euros and, at the same…

Products and services increasingly get smarter and more interconnected, forming intelligent eco-systems that allow the generation and sharing of large amounts of data through the internet. These new data often find their way in the evaluation of new products, but only after the design process has been concluded. Janne van Kollenburg and Sander Bogers, designers…

The era of fully fledged quantum computers threatens to destroy internet security as we know it. Researchers are in a race against time to prepare new cryptographic techniques before the arrival of quantum computers, as cryptographers Tanja Lange (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands) and Daniel J. Bernstein (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA) describe…

Materials that move all by themselves under the influence of light — this phenomenon has been known for a number of years. However, since the source tends to be ultraviolet light, the required intensity can damage the material. The challenge was to find a material that behaves in this way in visible light, preferably unprocessed…

Plants and trees soak up water in the soil by letting it vaporize through pores in the leaves. Scientists at TU/e have now taken this principle to develop a sweat sensor through which the sweat itself flows at a steady rate and is analyzed. Using laser micro-manufacturing, they made minuscule structures in flexible plastic and…

Last month Eindhoven University of Technology began using a concrete printer that enables objects of up to 11 meters long, 5 meters wide and 4 meter high to be printed. The university will be working with the building industry to develop knowledge over the course of a number of years to print pioneering and easily…

In the same way as we now connect computers in networks through optical signals, it could also be possible to connect future quantum computers in a ‘quantum internet’. The optical signals would then consist of individual light particles or photons. One prerequisite for a working quantum internet is control of the shape of these photons.…

TU/e researchers show promising technology in Nature Communications              A hard drive stores bits in the form of tiny magnetic domains. The directions of the magnetic north and south poles of these domains, which are referred to as the magnetization, determine whether they are a 0 or a 1. Data is stored by changing the direction…

OLEDs – thin, light-emitting surfaces – are regarded as the light sources of the future. White OLEDs consist of stacked, ultra-thin layers, each emitting its own light color, all together resulting in white light. Up to now it has been impossible to predict the exact light color produced by a white OLED; manufacturers had to…