Dames winnen ‘bèta’s battle’

Vijftien teams TU-studenten namen het tegen elkaar op. Ze moesten voor Plan Nederland een duurzame oplossing bedenken voor het in kaart brengen van de Foster Parents-kinderen en hun situatie. Het regionale kantoor van Plan Nederland in Zambia heeft daarmee grote problemen. De wedstrijd werd begeleid door consultants van organisator Accenture

Finale en geld
Wat voor oplossing het winnende team bedacht, houdt de organisatie nog voor zich, omdat er deze en volgende week nog drie voorrondes zijn. Het winnende team plaatste zich voor de landelijke finale die in februari volgend jaar is. Behalve de finaleplaats sleepten ze 1500 euro binnen voor studievereniging S.T.V.B. Curius. Het geld mag worden besteed aan een strategische investering of een goed doel.

Naast het team van Bloo, Van Minderhout en Langenberg plaatste de nummer twee van de voorronde zich voor de finale. Dat team bestaat uit Alexander Zonneveld (masterstudent bij CiTG), Philip Wegener (masterstudent 3mE), Jan Willem Blaisse (masterstudent CiTG) en Reinout de Roos (masterstudent 3mE)

Delta 19-04-2007
‘Bees can contribute to food production on long space missions by pollinating flowers. But is a bee able to fly without gravity? Aerospace engineering student, Wouter van der Geur, is developing a method to test this.’ 

Wouter van der Geur graduated in August 2008, based on his design of a bee motion tracking instrument, which was part of the ‘Bees in Space’ programme. This programme researches the possibility of bees being able to fly and pollinate flowers in a microgravity environment. If successful, the bees could help supply food on long space missions to Mars, for example. In 2007, the plan was that by the end of 2012 bees would be sent to the ISS space station to show that they were able to land on an artificial flower and pollinate it under microgravity conditions. “Maybe 2012 is too soon”, says Van der Geur now, “but the project is still running and I’m pretty sure that the bees will travel to the ISS when everything is ready.”

Van der Geur designed the bee motion tracking instrument to monitor and analyze the individual flight trajectories of bees in a small bee habitat. The instrument is a digital imaging system, consisting of two high-resolution cameras that determine the 3D position of the bees. “It will be used to research how bees move in space”, Van der Geur explains. “The gravity on Mars is about one third of the gravity on Earth and the light circumstances also differ, which influences the bees.”
During his graduation project, Van der Geur spent time at RMIT University in Australia, where most of the ‘Bees in Space’ research is conducted. One of the projects biggest problems was that it was still not clear which bee species would be chosen for the experiments. Van der Geur: “Large bees are easier to follow with cameras than small bees, but large-sized bee species only pollinate flowers when they live in large populations of tens of thousands bees, while small-sized species also pollinate when living in small groups.” The experiment at the ISS only has space for a population of fifteen bees, which means that the resolution of Van der Geur’s instrument must be high enough to detect small bees.

Meanwhile, a greenhouse has been constructed in Australian desert to simulate the Martian environment and conduct more than five hundred tests. “To research the bees’ behaviour, more than my motion tracking instrument is needed”, Van der Geur says. “At this moment students are designing artificial flowers and an inflatable bee habitat.” When everything is ready and tested the bees will travel in hibernation to the ISS to show exactly what they are capable of.