A description of our experiences with a model for education in innovative, interdisciplinary and international engineering. (Students from different (technical) disciplines in Higher Education are placed in industry for a period of eighteen months after completing two-and-a-half year of theoretical studies). They work in multi-disciplinary projects on different themes, in order to grow to fully equal employees in industry. Besides students, teachers and company employees participate in the projects. The involvement of other level students, both from University and from Vocational Education, is recommended. The experiments in practice give confidence in the succesful implementation of this model.
Additions to the book "Systems Design and Engineering" by Bonnema et.al. Subjects were chosen based on the Systems Engineering needs for Small and Medium Enterprises, as researched in the SESAME project. The
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Het doen van co-design en co-research samen met de mensen in het betreffende maatschappelijk domein kan veel beweging in gang zetten. Het is zaak om ook juist deze functie van applied design research als ‘key enabling methodology’ verder te ontwikkelen, evenals een repertoire van cases te verzamelen om uit te kunnen putten.
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Manual labour is an important cornerstone in manufacturing and considering human factors and ergonomics is a crucial field of action from both social and economic perspective. Diverse approaches are available in research and practice, ranging from guidelines, ergonomic assessment sheets over to digitally supported workplace design or hardware oriented support technologies like exoskeletons. However, in the end those technologies, methods and tools put the working task in focus and just aim to make manufacturing “less bad” with reducing ergonomic loads as much as possible. The proposed project “Human Centered Smart Factories: design for wellbeing for future manufacturing” wants to overcome this conventional paradigm and considers a more proactive and future oriented perspective. The underlying vision of the project is a workplace design for wellbeing that makes labor intensive manufacturing not just less bad but aims to provide positive contributions to physiological and mental health of workers. This shall be achieved through a human centered technology approach and utilizing advanced opportunities of smart industry technologies and methods within a cyber physical system setup. Finally, the goal is to develop smart, shape-changing workstations that self-adapt to the unique and personal, physical and cognitive needs of a worker. The workstations are responsive, they interact in real time, and promote dynamic activities and varying physical exertion through understanding the context of work. Consequently, the project follows a clear interdisciplinary approach and brings together disciplines like production engineering, human interaction design, creative design techniques and social impact assessment. Developments take place in an industrial scale test bed at the University of Twente but also within an industrial manufacturing factory. Through the human centered design of adaptive workplaces, the project contributes to a more inclusive and healthier society. This has also positive effects from both national (e.g. relieve of health system) as well as individual company perspective (e.g. less costs due to worker illness, higher motivation and productivity). Even more, the proposal offers new business opportunities through selling products and/or services related to the developed approach. To tap those potentials, an appropriate utilization of the results is a key concern . The involved manufacturing company van Raam will be the prototypical implementation partner and serve as critical proof of concept partner. Given their openness, connections and broad range of processes they are also an ideal role model for further manufacturing companies. ErgoS and Ergo Design are involved as methodological/technological partners that deal with industrial engineering and ergonomic design of workplace on a daily base. Thus, they are crucial to critically reflect wider applicability and innovativeness of the developed solutions. Both companies also serve as multiplicator while utilizing promising technologies and methods in their work. Universities and universities of applied sciences utilize results through scientific publications and as base for further research. They also ensure the transfer to education as an important leverage to inspire and train future engineers towards wellbeing design of workplaces.
Human kind has a major impact on the state of life on Earth, mainly caused by habitat destruction, fragmentation and pollution related to agricultural land use and industrialization. Biodiversity is dominated by insects (~50%). Insects are vital for ecosystems through ecosystem engineering and controlling properties, such as soil formation and nutrient cycling, pollination, and in food webs as prey or controlling predator or parasite. Reducing insect diversity reduces resilience of ecosystems and increases risks of non-performance in soil fertility, pollination and pest suppression. Insects are under threat. Worldwide 41 % of insect species are in decline, 33% species threatened with extinction, and a co-occurring insect biomass loss of 2.5% per year. In Germany, insect biomass in natural areas surrounded by agriculture was reduced by 76% in 27 years. Nature inclusive agriculture and agri-environmental schemes aim to mitigate these kinds of effects. Protection measures need success indicators. Insects are excellent for biodiversity assessments, even with small landscape adaptations. Measuring insect biodiversity however is not easy. We aim to use new automated recognition techniques by machine learning with neural networks, to produce algorithms for fast and insightful insect diversity indexes. Biodiversity can be measured by indicative species (groups). We use three groups: 1) Carabid beetles (are top predators); 2) Moths (relation with host plants); 3) Flying insects (multiple functions in ecosystems, e.g. parasitism). The project wants to design user-friendly farmer/citizen science biodiversity measurements with machine learning, and use these in comparative research in 3 real life cases as proof of concept: 1) effects of agriculture on insects in hedgerows, 2) effects of different commercial crop production systems on insects, 3) effects of flower richness in crops and grassland on insects, all measured with natural reference situations
In the quest of lowering atmospheric CO2 levels, Zero Emission Fuel (ZEF) B.V. is developing a small-scale microplant unit to produce a liquid fuel (methanol) directly from the air powered by only solar energy. By focusing on numbering up instead of scaling up, ZEF aims to shorten the development cycle of novel chemical processes and products. Within the microplant unit of ZEF, the core process that captures CO2 directly from the atmosphere resembles existing processes that capture CO2 from smokestacks. Therefore, it also inherits the existing challenge of sorbent degradation and short lifetime of chemicals and components: metal inside the process (in pipe, pump, heat exchanger, etc.) act as a catalyst for the lifetime-inhibiting oxidative degradation. A possible solution that could solve the degradation issues is the avoidance of metals altogether, in the entire process. In this project, a consortium of both industry and academic partners will kick off a new development roadmap that scouts, develops, tests and deploys new non-metal materials for CO2 capture processes. The small scale of the ZEF-process allows for fast innovation cycles through an iterative approach. The second industrial partner, Promolding B.V., provides a vast experience in the prototyping and application of novel polymers. The groups of TUD (sustainable Design Engineering at Industrial Design Engineering faculty together with Materials Science and Engineering at 3mE faculty) unlock deep understanding of materials and knowledge how to select, tweak or design novel composite materials until the necessary properties have been found. After this project, the development will continue to result in a chemical process that has longer lifetime, lower cost and is more sustainable. This will not only be at the benefit of the ZEF CO2 capture process, but also at the benefit of the chemical and materials industry as a whole.
