Trajectory Optimisation for a Rail-based Ttrack Surveying System

Railway transportation is crucial to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and meeting increasing global demand for passenger and freight transport. To maintain a reliable, high-capacity railway infrastructure, regular and accurate maintenance is necessary. The recent development of a Rail-based Track<br/>Surveying System that can be mounted on any...

Estimating Wind Fields Using Physically Inspired Neural Networks With Aircraft Surveillance Data

Wind estimation plays an important role in many aspects of our world, both for nowcasting and forecasting. This is also true for aircraft flight routes; where wind field knowledge can contribute to flight planning and safety. Aircraft can relay flight information back to ground-based receivers, from which local wind measurements can be derived....

Sustainability and Circularity Challenges in Aerospace Engineering Education: for the sustainability transition

The aerospace industry and TU Delft have set stringent climate goals for themselves and with each passing year, these goals seem all the more implausible. While sustainability in the aerospace industry is envisioned as futuristic, circular, net-zero aircraft, the change rarely comes from the grassroots. Although these technological solutions are...

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on a MOOC in Aerospace Structures and Materials

In March 2020 COVID-19 brought the world and with that aviation to a standstill. Also in March 2020, the third run of the DelftX MOOC Introduction to Aerospace<br/>Structures and Materials started on edX. This MOOC generally attracts a mixture of young aviation enthusiasts (often students) and aviation professionals. Given the large interest...

Development of an optimization framework for landing gear design

An opportunity was identified to improve the traditional landing gear design process. Especially in the conceptual design phase, lots of man-hours are consumed by making the same calculations over and over again, for different concepts. Often, an existing gear is therefore used as initial starting point, to simplify the design process. This...

Hands on Workshop on Teaching Forensic Engineering Teaching Students Critical Thinking by Investigative mindset

When teaching Engineering to students it is important that we not only teach about<br/>how to engineer new things but also look at the failures and performance problems<br/>from an engineering point-of-view. The field that studies this part of engineering is<br/>known as Forensic Engineering. The American Society of Civil Engineers defines this...

Push or Pull Students into Blended Education A Case Study at Delft University of Technology

Blended education, or “flipping the classroom” is rapidly becoming a mainstream form of teaching within universities. Within Engineering Education, it is popular as it allows more time in-class to focus on hands on activities such as demonstrations and solving complex problems. This paper discusses the effort conducted to restructure, according...

Contrail Mitigation by means of 4D Aircraft Trajectory Optimisation

Aviation has a significant impact on the global atmosphere. Next to particle and gas emissions, the increase of cloud cover might increasingly contribute to aviation induced climate change. Water contained in the exhaust of jet engines locally raises the relative humidity levels sufficiently for contrail formation to occur. These contrails can...

Educating engineering practice in six design projects in a row

Tomorrow’s engineers are required to have a good balance between deep working knowledge of engineering sciences and engineering skills. In the Bachelor in Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft, students are educated to master these competences so that they are ready to engineer when they graduate. The bachelor curriculum has three mainstreams of...

The trail of six design projects in the Delft bachelor Aerospace Engineering

Tomorrow’s engineers are required to have a good balance between deep working knowledge of engineering sciences and engineering skills. In the Bachelor Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft, students are educated to master these competences so that they are ready to engineer when they graduate. The bachelor curriculum has three mainstreams of about...

Filtering techniques for orbital debris conjunction analysis

The steadily growing amount of orbital debris increases the probability and amount of collisions between two objects in orbit about the Earth. These collisions in turn create even more debris, and it is therefore important to keep track of future conjunctions. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN) uses ground- and space-based sensors to...

3, 2, 1, Launch!

It is important that young people who chose to pursue a degree in engineering stick with their choice. Unfortunately students often loose their motivation during their first year. This paper gives an example of how the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of Delft University in The Netherlands manages to keep a large number of freshmen motivated and...

Study of Delft aerospace alumni

This thesis reports on an alumni study of the Faculty Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology to discover what the impact is of the degree in aerospace engineering on an alumnus' professional success and comment on what are important qualities for aerospace engineers to have in order to differentiate themselves from those with an...

Design of cut-outs in shell structures