The curriculum of the Electrical and Electronic Department has been changed enormously in the past decade. Fewer lessons and many more projects were introduced. Meanwhile it has become a topic at Dutch educational institutes to feel not only responsible for improvement of theoretical and practical skills, but also of 'competences' in a broader sense. The projects are quite well guided in the beginning and become much more open ended in the last part of the curriculum. In that last part we also work with industrial and with international partners in IPD projects. It turns out that students want to keep the same roles in the teams that they are subsequentially a member of. With the introduction of competences and the aid of a student portfolio we want to give opportunities to the students to improve their competences. We try to persuade them to play many different roles in the project teams. In this paper we show you how we are implementing our ideas.
The Saxion University of Applied Sciences recently started the project “Safety atWork”. The objective of the project is to increase safety at the workplace by applyingand combining state of the art artifacts Ambient Intelligence, Industrial & ProductDesign and Smart Functional Materials [1].There is a human factor involved as well. Preliminary, safety is related to incidentshappening to persons who get injured or even die. In 97% of the cases where an injuryoccurs [2] that what happens is within someone’s control. Many incidents at work areoften the result of human behavior, how people interact with each other and howpeople cope with risks and guidelines. Industrial environments need to be organizedin such a way that people behave safely in an automatic way and that safety becomesa habit. Forcing safe behavior starts with safe products. However, in many cases thisis not sufficient, and incidents still occur. Therefore communication is often a moreeffective medium. One cost effective, asynchronous, and persisting way ofcommunicating to people is through ICT. The effort of changing behavior throughICT is called Persuasive Technology. In this paper we focus on ambient aspects ofsafety: influencing people in an invisible way to make industrial environments safer.Based on literature we work towards a model to systematically select measures toinfluence behavior to enhance safety. The model is a rudimentary framework still tobe filled out, which is the subject of our current research projects.
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The key role of Restructing Agencies in achieving high private investments and creating employment. Effective revitalization leads to economically vital and future proof industrial parks. This short paper tells how revitalization can be effectively performed. Preliminary results are presented of a four year study of the Restructuring Agency of Overijssel, active in revitalization in the Province of Overijssel in the Netherlands. The study identifies, presents and reflects on the effectiveness of working methods used by the restructuring agency in seven revitalization projects of industrial parks. The value of continuously focusing on willingness to invest is identified as a key working method and success factor. Other working methods illustrate the importance and effectiveness of goal-oriented choices that aim at snowball effects, the use of dynamic opportunity maps, choosing own role based on complementarity, always developing business cases that contribute to value cases, and managing the important relationship between effective working methods and capability of individuals and organizations. Ongoing research aims at further underpinning provisional conclusions about the use and effectiveness of working methods, and the development of a toolbox for practitioners that will contain and integrate capability profiles, working methods, and the related change management approach.
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3D betonprinten is een techniek met een grote potentie voor de bouwsector . Het in 2018 geëindigde RAAK-mkb KONKREET project, heeft voor lectoraat Industrial Design en de betrokken partners veel inzichten op gebied van 3D betonprinten opgeleverd. (van Beuren & Vrooijink, 2018) Één van deze inzichten is dat door het laagsgewijs opbouwen van het object bij 3D betonprinten het wapenen nog als uitdaging kan worden gezien. Immers als de wapening er al is wanneer de printkop er langs komt zit deze de printkop in de weg, en wanneer deze later aangebracht moet worden kan het beton al zijn uitgehard. Dit ‘wapeningsprobleem’ zorgt ervoor dat wapening uit het printvlak in-situ niet te realiseren is. Binnen het KONKREET project is hiervoor als oplossing een concept met technisch textiel bedacht om te wapenen. Hierbij kan het vormbare textiel tijdens het printproces tegen het oppervlak worden aangedrukt. De partners van dit project, Ter Steege advies & innovatie en Vertico XL printing, willen bewijzen dat door het concept verder uit te werken een belangrijke drempel van het 3D betonprinten kan worden weggenomen. Het doel is om een methode te ontwikkelen om in-situ wapening in de vorm van technisch textiel te realiseren bij 3D geprint beton. Dit vraagt om een creatieve oplossing. Om dit te doen zijn er 6 projectstappen: 1. Belastingseis vaststellen 2. Geschikt textiel selecteren 3. Methode ontwikkelen voor het aanbrengen van textiel 4. Onderzoek naar binding textiel aan het beton 5. Onderzoek naar de mechanische eigenschappen van het nieuwe materiaal 6. Disseminatie van de opgedane kennis. Belangrijk is om hierbij te benoemen dat het om een verkennend onderzoek gaat waarbij onderzocht wordt of het een kansrijke wapeningsmethode kan zijn.
The increasing amount of electronic waste (e-waste) urgently requires the use of innovative solutions within the circular economy models in this industry. Sorting of e-waste in a proper manner are essential for the recovery of valuable materials and minimizing environmental problems. The conventional e-waste sorting models are time-consuming processes, which involve laborious manual classification of complex and diverse electronic components. Moreover, the sector is lacking in skilled labor, thus making automation in sorting procedures is an urgent necessity. The project “AdapSort: Adaptive AI for Sorting E-Waste” aims to develop an adaptable AI-based system for optimal and efficient e-waste sorting. The project combines deep learning object detection algorithms with open-world vision-language models to enable adaptive AI models that incorporate operator feedback as part of a continuous learning process. The project initiates with problem analysis, including use case definition, requirement specification, and collection of labeled image data. AI models will be trained and deployed on edge devices for real-time sorting and scalability. Then, the feasibility of developing adaptive AI models that capture the state-of-the-art open-world vision-language models will be investigated. The human-in-the-loop learning is an important feature of this phase, wherein the user is enabled to provide ongoing feedback about how to refine the model further. An interface will be constructed to enable human intervention to facilitate real-time improvement of classification accuracy and sorting of different items. Finally, the project will deliver a proof of concept for the AI-based sorter, validated through selected use cases in collaboration with industrial partners. By integrating AI with human feedback, this project aims to facilitate e-waste management and serve as a foundation for larger projects.
The textile and clothing sector belongs to the world’s biggest economic activities. Producing textiles is highly energy-, water- and chemical-intensive and consequently the textile industry has a strong impact on environment and is regarded as the second greatest polluter of clean water. The European textile industry has taken significant steps taken in developing sustainable manufacturing processes and materials for example in water treatment and the development of biobased and recycled fibres. However, the large amount of harmful and toxic chemicals necessary, especially the synthetic colourants, i.e. the pigments and dyes used to colour the textile fibres and fabrics remains a serious concern. The limited range of alternative natural colourants that is available often fail the desired intensity and light stability and also are not provided at the affordable cost . The industrial partners and the branch organisations Modint and Contactgroep Textiel are actively searching for sustainable alternatives and have approached Avans to assist in the development of the colourants which led to the project Beauti-Fully Biobased Fibres project proposal. The objective of the Beauti-Fully Biobased Fibres project is to develop sustainable, renewable colourants with improved light fastness and colour intensity for colouration of (biobased) man-made textile fibres Avans University of Applied Science, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Wageningen University & Research, Maastricht University and representatives from the textile industry will actively collaborate in the project. Specific approaches have been identified which build on knowledge developed by the knowledge partners in earlier projects. These will now be used for designing sustainable, renewable colourants with the improved quality aspects of light fastness and intensity as required in the textile industry. The selected approaches include refining natural extracts, encapsulation and novel chemical modification of nano-particle surfaces with chromophores.
