Multidimensional sustainability assessment of solar products: Educating engineers and designers

Since 2008 the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft hosts the minor Sustainable Design Engineering. The minor has been highly useful as a platform to pilot new ways of teaching engineering for sustainable development. Instead of having students make life cycle assessments and introduce them to straightforward checklists to...

Three Ways of Assessing the Inertial Biomechanics of a Cyclist's Leg

Due to the complexity of joints and the difficulty to get accurate position measurements, most biomechanical analyses regarding cycling are based on some basic assumptions. For instance, a fixed distance is often set between the hip joint and the seat. Sometimes, this joint is considered to be coincident with the line of the seat-tube. Other...

Energy efficient products and smart homes

Environmental sizing of smartphone batteries

Smartphone use has increased at a phenomenal pace worldwide. In 2011 more smartphones have been sold than desktop pc’s, notebooks, netbooks and tablets together. The total worldwide smartphone sales reached 472 million units in 2011, and 149 million of them were sold in the fourth quarter of 2011. The smartphone is, like almost every other...

Direct Methanol Fuel Cell systems in portable electronics - a metrics-based conceptualization approach

It is impossible to imagine life without portable electronics like the laptop computer and cell phone. All these products are powered by a battery, granting them grid independence and all-round protability. Connectivity to the internet and an increase of functionality demands for a better battery. The d1irect methanol fuel cell (DMFC) system...

Selection of Power Sources for Portable Applications

New power sources emerge very quickly. Implementation of hybrid power sources for portable electronics depends on the knowledge of industrial designers. For now this group has little understanding of fuel cells and especially fuel-cell hybrids. This slows down implementation and increases the chance of failure. In this paper a review is given of...

Tissue holding device for use during surgical procedure, has contact body with suction foot and suction mouth that is surrounded by rim, and suction pipe connected to suction chamber

The device has a locking ring (5), a connector (6), and a contact body (1) with a suction foot and a suction mouth (8), where the mouth is surrounded by a rim (10), which is substantially located in a plane of the suction foot. A suction chamber (9) has a sieve-shaped inner wall (2) and a transparent side wall, and a suction pipe (11) is...

Power sources compared: The ultimate truth?

Especially, during the last decade the demand for portable power is steadily rising due to the increasing wireless products integrated in our day-to-day lives (cellular phone, personal digital assistant (PDA) and of course the remote control for your television set or VCR). These portable consumer electronics are mainly powered by alkaline...