Participating Teams

Team Daedalus aims to empower humanitarian institutions through a platform for sustained aerial surveillance. By developing a semi-autonomous solar-powered drone, the team is creating a useful tool for wildfire detection and monitoring. Students are currently focusing on creating prototypes iteratively, with the goal of reaching 24h of continuous flight within the following few years.

Student team SOLID is developing technology to store hydrogen with iron. This way, hydrogen can be stored in a cheap, safe, and compact way, compared to state-of-the-art technologies. Furthermore, the iron can be used multiple times, making it a circular energy carrier that doesn't need any CO2 in its process of storing energy. Currently, our team is building an installation that is able to produce hydrogen from iron and steam. However, we do realize that the iron used in our process ideally shouldn't originate from the mines directly as mining new ores is an intensive process, which can affect the environment of the mine immensely. Therefore we are looking at the possibility to use iron from waste streams to use in our reactor.

The existing billing infrastructure in retail stores is an overlooked and unsustainable practice. With 90% of paper bills produced ending up in the trash or forgotten, that too within 10 seconds of being printed, it’s outrageous to think about the resources consumed for production of a bill. However, bills are still used on a daily basis - majorly for customer checkout, and marginally as proof for returns and warranty. Moreover, customer purchases are vital data for the stores which is analyzed digitally through POS software, while the bills provided to customers requires a lot of effort from the customer's side to extract valuable insights for themselves.

Humanity has travelled to space using electronic chips powering mechanical components. With the constant burst of radiation from the sun and the rest of the universe, data can get corrupted. To combat this problem in space, a lot of defensive measures are taken to keep the gathered data safe. These methods are extremely costly. Next to this, sending equipment to space remains a tricky process. How can we quantify exact issues better? How can we safely transmit/receive data in a different way?

Information (especially in complex businesses or projects) can be vast and often go way beyond the limit of what humans can process and remember. In an ever more complex world, there should be a simpler way to look up, interact with and get to decisions with your data.

Climate change as a result of human emissions.

The future of energy production is clear - it is renewables that are going to take the lead. However, they have one shortcoming - intermittency. Due to wind patterns, night and day cycles, and overall weather, solar and wind energy are not stable in their operation. Furthermore, it is not only that there is too little energy when we need it but sometimes there is an excess. Then we hear stories about private solar panels being disconnected from the grid.

Warehouses, harbors, and airports are demanded to operate at a faster and faster rate every day. Advancements in technologies have allowed this to happen by introducing automated guided vehicles, which have proven effective in these sectors. However, at what cost? These vehicles use big batteries for which content is harmful to the environment after its lifetime. Besides, to build these machines, we exploit many of the planet's rare metals and resources. Financially speaking, it is not very productive to have an area where AGVs can charge and the time it takes for them to be charged.

Nurdle Soup strives to fill the unmet, pressing need for environmental sensing to localize and remove plastic spills of all sizes in ecologically vulnerable areas. Our focus is on prioritizing the protection of sensitive ecosystems, while also raising awareness on the global microplastics crisis, especially amongst the plastics industry, policy makers and cleaning initiatives. The magnitude of the impact of plastic pollution on the environment continues to grow, making this mission critical.

There is a surplus of manure in the Netherlands. Mandatory manure processing is not profitable and needs high subsidies.