Projects

Globally we are facing severe water stress and security challenges due to more frequent and serious droughts combined with increasing water demand by society. Industrial activities play a key role in societal water demand, while also frequently being the first to be affected by water shortages. For example, in the region of Flanders (Belgium), nearly a quarter of the gross value added is generated by industrial activities. Flanders is, however, ...

While dispersed territories make up a majority of the recent Flemish urbanisation, they are seldom interpreted as a city. Moreover, in mainstream discourses dispersed territories are considered as a spillover of the traditional city and conceived either as not urban enough or a loss of rural and natural values and thus to be remediated. Interpreting dispersed territories as an autonomous urban condition however enables to valorize existing ...

Characterization of the tricuspid valve (TV) is a crucial step within the planning oftranscatheter TV replacement operations. While CT scans are the traditional golden standards for this process, they entail limitations that impede their use in daily practice and might even compromise patient’s health. In contrast, ultrasonic echocardiography represents a logistically simpler and more risk-free alternative, but is restricted to the ...

The use of hydrogen has been shown as one of the most promising solutions for our society to develop in a green and sustainable way. Material innovations that enable the safe storage and distribution of hydrogen are therefore of utmost importance for the complete decarbonization of several industrial sectors. In this explorative project we aim to establish a consortium that participates in European calls for advancing modeling and experimental ...

The increasing availability of new climate data products and advances in modelling now mean that it is
possible for the first time to produce reliable forecasts for lake and river water quality on regional and global scales.
inventWater (Inventive forecasting tools for adapting water quality management to a new climate) will bring water
quality forecasting to the forefront of the scientific disciplines supporting managers and ...

Building on our prior experience with an SRP Growth funding project, we plan to combine state-of-the-art microfluidic approaches and optical detection for studying the phenomenon of biological condensation. We aim to develop novel chip designs for i) manipulating and visualizing sub-µm particles, ii) creating special mixing regimes for studying equilibrium transient phenomena, and iii) observing nucleation phenomena on the surface or within ...

Buildings and cities contribute significantly to global environmental issues, including greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, waste and pollution. Life cycle assessment (LCA) enables the assessment and optimisation of the environmental impact of buildings over their entire life cycle. In Belgium, various steps have been taken to integrate LCA in building practice: a national LCA method has been developed, a national database is ...

The current research is part of a bigger research program in which I further develop and empirically test a cultural psychological approach to acculturation. This approach centers on the notion of ‘cultural fit’ – i.e., the extent to which an individual’s pattern of psychological functioning is similar to the typical pattern of others in the socio-cultural context. In the coming two years, I intend to focus on two of the four research lines that ...

An exchange program is proposed here with which three researchers from key institutes in Japan will be trained in Flanders in the beginning of 2012 on a specific technique to measure a soil property that affects the fate of the radiocaesium in Japanese soil. This property was described first by Prof. Adrien Cremers in 1988 (Cremers et al., 1988) and is now used by numerous researchers to screen soils for their vulnerability to this ...