As all objects around us become smarter, it seems only natural for old-fashioned industrial robots to follow the movement. The FACTORY-IN-A-DAY project has given them a push, making robot automation a serious avenue even for SMEs producing low volumes of highly diversified products. Robot automation may stand to reason when you’re running a high-throughput assembly line, but the business rationale is not so straightforward for SMEs.

The worldwide race to create more, better and reliable quantum processors is progressing fast, as a team of TU Delft scientists led by Professor Vandersypen has realised yet again. In a neck-and-neck race with their competitors, they showed that quantum information of an electron spin can be transported to a photon, in a silicon quantum chip. This is important in order to connect quantum bits across the chip and allowing to scale up to large numb...

If photonics is to meet the needs of a new generation of applications, problems will need to be addressed through better design and modelling. The EU-funded ADOPSYS project approached this challenge as much with a skills-based answer, as a technical one. Currently the field of photonics suffers from a lack of broad expertise in applied modelling and design for industrial optical systems and components.

Researchers from TU Delft in The Netherlands, in collaboration with a team at the University of Cambridge, have found a way to create and clean tiny mechanical sensors in a scalable manner. They created these sensors by suspending a 2D sheet of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), or 'white graphene' over small holes in a silicon substrate. This innovation could lead to extremely small gas and pressure sensors for future electronics.

Hydrogen is a highly promising energy carrier. But it can also be dangerous, as it is combustible and difficult to detect. Using hydrogen safely requires sensors that can detect even the smallest of leaks. Researchers from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands), KU Leuven (Belgium) and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) have discovered that the metal hafnium is perfect for the job.

A team of researchers led by Leo Kouwenhoven at TU Delft has demonstrated an on-chip microwave laser based on a fundamental property of superconductivity, the ac Josephson effect. They embedded a small section of an interrupted superconductor, a Josephson junction, in a carefully engineered on-chip cavity. Such a device opens the door to many applications in which microwave radiation with minimal dissipation is key, for example in controlling qub...

Researchers from the Graphene Flagship have found a new potential application for graphene: mechanical pixels. By applying a pressure difference across graphene membranes, the perceived colour of the graphene can be shifted continuously from red to blue. This effect could be exploited for use as coloured pixels in e-readers and other low-powered screens.

Researchers at TU Delft have made flat surfaces that are 3D printed and then 'taught' how to self- fold later. The materials are potentially very well suited for all kinds of medical implants. They report on their findings in the October 24th edition of Materials Horizons which features this research on its cover. Complete regeneration of functional tissues is the holy grail of tissue engineering and could revolutionise treatment o...

A team of scientists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University reduced storage to the ultimate limit: They stored one kilobyte (8,000 bits) representing each bit by the position of a single chlorine atom. "In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp," says lead scientist Sander Otte. They reached a storage density of 500 Tbpsi, 500 times better than the best com...

Researchers from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands), in collaboration with colleagues from the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), have found a simple yet very effective solution to greatly increase the efficiency and stability of hydrogen production through solar-driven water splitting. By separating the positive and the negative electrodes using a bipolar membrane, they were ...

Scientists at TU Delft, together with colleagues from the Tübingen University, have successfully created nano-electronic circuits using a recently discovered 2D superconductor. What makes this material unique is that its superconductivity can be turned on and off remotely, very much like the switching of electrical current in a transistor on a microchip.

Computation RFID is a small device which converts ambient energy (from nearby radio transmissions) to communicate and obtain power for computing. Their size and perpetual lifetime allows them to be embedded in anything, living organisms included, once for the entire lifetime. And now, for the first time, a team of researchers from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands) and University of Washington demonstrated that battery-les...