PostDoc position: “Driving Equitable and Accessible 15 Minute Neighbourhood Transformations” (DREAMS).

Are you a passionate researcher with interest in the fast-pacing advances in the field of accessibility and sustainable urban mobility? The University of Twente has a 3-year opening for a postdoctoral researcher position in the European research project “Driving Equitable and Accessible 15 Minute Neighbourhood Transformations” (DREAMS). DREAMS will examine how co-created and user-centric mobility services, mobility and flexible activity hubs can contribute to accessible, sustainable, and inclusive 15-minute city neighborhoods in urban outskirts in European cities and regions.

The DREAMS project is coordinated by the University of Twente. In the project you will work closely with research and industrial partners from six countries, including the following universities: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna (BOKU), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Gustave Eiffel University, Technical University of Munich, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Vienna University of Technology, and University of Applied Sciences Utrecht. In the DREAMS project you will conduct research that goes beyond the state of the art to explore the potential of user-centric mobility services and mobility and flexible activity hubs that can promote 15-minute city neighborhoods for inclusive, sustainable, and accessible cities and regions. The research will be applied in six living labs in Vienna, Brussels, Utrecht, Munich, Paris, and Budapest.

THE CHALLENGE

In the DREAMS project you will be responsible for the coordination of the activities of the Utrecht living lab, which is one of the six project living labs, liaise with the local partners, organize surveys and participatory workshops, organize networking/stakeholder events, analyze big data from mobility service providers, and collaborate with researchers from the six other universities in the project to adopt best practices from other living labs.

Specific research questions that will be addressed in this postdoctoral research project are:

• Investigate the concept of 15-minute cities, identify the boundaries of the concept, determine the current planning approaches, and the role of walkability and cyclability in urban/suburban/rural mobility.
• Investigate innovative mobility services and the roles of local stores to identify the current role of shared mobility services and mobility hubs in urban outskirts
• Examine the potential impact of different business models for shared e-bikes with a focus on disadvantaged residents (low-income) currently having no access to (e)bikes in the urban fringes.
• Develop models (based on surveys conducted in each living lab) to estimate perceived accessibility to amenities for different groups of people living in urban outskirts
• Examine and test different business and governance frameworks models to develop new mobility hubs with shared e-bikes in a district with a low socio-economic status where currently no operators are active.
• Contribute to the development of a new regulatory framework for micromobility services to be introduced in 2024, to create a more socially inclusive distribution of micromobility services.

The expected outcome is:

• The successful coordination of Utrecht living lab
• The publication of research papers and technical reports related to the deliverables of the project
• The successful adoption of best practices from other living labs to the living lab of Utrecht

Post-doc research position “Hydrogen uptake and diffusion in thin film stacks”

We are looking for a motivated and skilled post-doctoral researcher to carry out advanced physics research on probing hydrogen uptake and diffusion in thin films used for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) optics applications. Our aim is to develop understanding how uptake and diffusion of hydrogen can be monitored in-situ, under realistic test conditions and with good reproducibility.

Your project will be part of a larger research programme on the physics of thin films for EUV applications (XTOOLS), coordinated by the XUV Optics Group at Twente (www.utwente.nl/xuv). We develop forefront fundamental research, relevant to high tech applications in collaboration with our industrial partners (Zeiss, ASML, Malvern Panalytical and VDL). The research will take place in a state-of-the-art thin film laboratory within the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Twente, which will allow you ample opportunities to collaborate and interact with various academic and industrial partners.

Your goal is to develop a custom thin film stack specifically designed for probing hydrogen uptake, and to develop a robust measurement procedure (including transport through air / ambient) to quantify hydrogen diffusion through change in optical properties of this stack. This includes:

• Selecting materials for optically probing hydrogen uptake, and protective layers for transport through air.
• Understanding the fundamental physics and chemistry of hydrogen uptake on, diffusion through and possible release from these films.

Develop a concept for preparation of a layer stack for optically detecting hydrogen diffusion through EUV optical materials and verifying this method against established reference methods for hydrogen detection

Projectmedewerker - onderwijs en arbeidsmarkt

De Universiteit Twente (UT) verzorgt samen met de Vrije Universiteit (VU) de opleiding Mechanical Engineering. We bieden in Twente de bachelor en master en in Amsterdam de bachelor. De studenten van de locatie Amsterdam volgen een deel van de vakken in Twente. Vanuit de opleiding werken we actief aan samenwerking met het bedrijfsleven om zo waardevolle connecties te leggen voor studenten en voor bedrijven, studenten vakinhoudelijke relaties te leren zien en bedrijven te leren kennen, en studenten te ondersteunen in hun oriëntatie op studie en loopbaan. Hierbij vervul jij een belangrijke rol!

Wat ga je doen?

Als Projectmedewerker werk je mee aan de wisselwerking tussen studenten, de opleiding en bedrijven, je bent hierin een belangrijke schakel. Jouw takenpakket:

• Organiseren van activiteiten, zoals gastcolleges, bedrijfsbezoeken en loopbaan oriëntatie sessies. Je hebt afstemming over organisatie en planning met de betrokken docenten en coördinatoren van de opleidingsmodules en onderhoudt het contact met de bedrijven. Ook doe je verslag van activiteiten via social media.
• Bijdragen aan de verdere professionalisering van de minor-stage. Je evalueert bestaande procedures en richtlijnen, komt met verbetervoorstellen en verwerkt deze in de nodige documenten. Een voorbeeld hiervan is de handleiding voor studenten. Ook ga je aan de slag met een handleiding voor docenten.
• Docenten betrekken bij de stage-opdrachten die bedrijven aanbieden. Ondersteunen van studenten in hun zoektocht naar een stageplek en hierover voorlichting geven. Je bent aanspreekpunt voor docenten, studenten en bedrijven ten aanzien van de stage.
• Verzorgen van het administratieve proces voor, tijdens en na de stage. Je bent ervoor verantwoordelijk dat alle documenten worden aangeleverd en er correcte registratie plaatsvindt. Je onderneemt actie als er iets ontbreekt.
• Beheren en coördineren van de registratie van bedrijfsopdrachten en bedrijfsactiviteiten. Hierbij afstemming met bedrijven, de projectleider, onderwijscoördinatoren en docenten. Verzamelen van gegevens voor jaarrapportages.
• Opzetten en plannen van een contact-cyclus met bedrijven (bellen, mailings) voor het geven van informatie en ophalen van mogelijkheden voor stage- en afstudeeropdrachten voor zowel de bachelors als de master. Benutten van databases en CRM waar mogelijk.
• Inrichten en bijhouden van de online leeromgeving voor studenten, met onder andere informatie over (regionale) bedrijven en organisaties, en stage- en afstudeeropdrachten binnen de hele opleiding.
• Inrichten en bijhouden van een (online en actief) contactpunt voor bedrijven, met informatie over stages en afstuderen. Je coördineert tussen bedrijven en contactpersonen in de interne organisatie.

Als Projectmedewerker werk je veel samen met collega’s zoals docenten, onderwijscoördinatoren en opleidingsdirecteuren, van zowel de UT als de VU. Je standplaats is de UT en zo nu en dan op de VU. Het deels vanuit huis werken behoort in overleg tot de mogelijkheden.

Postdoc position in Intelligent Diagnostics for High-Tech Systems

The Dynamics based Maintenance group, Faculty of Engineering Technology at the University of Twente, The Netherlands has an opening for a postdoc candidate within the project “Engineering for Zero Downtime in Cyber-Physical Systems via Intelligent Diagnostics (ZORRO).

The Challenge

To increase the availability and reliability of critical and complex high-tech systems, like machines used in the semiconductor industry or industrial printing machines, data from sensors and inspections is used more and more to better detect or even predict failures. The aim of the current research project is to develop novel methods and tools to improve the (automatic) detection, diagnosis (and potential prediction) of failures. The main challenge will be the complexity of the considered cyber-physical systems, containing large numbers of components and subsystems with a wide range of potential failure modes. Purely relying on data-driven methods applied to sensor data will not yield a complete identification of all faults, which means that they will have to be fused with domain knowledge and physical degradation models. Collaboration in this national project with five industrial partners and several universities and research institutes allows the researchers to work with real data from advanced systems.

PhD position Integration of Ferroelectric Tunnel junctions

Integration of Ferroelectric Tunnel junctions

Although discovered much more recently than other types of Resistive RAM elements, ferroelectric memristors show the required performance for integration with CMOS. In the past couple of years, ferroelectric memristors with very promising properties have been demonstrated, as non-volatile resistive memory elements, including large OFF/ON ratios > 104 , reproducibility, high speed (< 10 ns), and potentially low operation energy (< 10 fJ). Most important, to minimize overall system power, the very high tunnelling electro resistance (TER) values (up to 1010 Ohms) of FTJs are ideal for integration with CMOS, resulting in low power operation.

In this project, crossbar arrays of memristive devices will be developed, in collaboration with TSST and Solmates, based on ferroelectric tunnel junctions (FTJs) and explore their integration with CMOS technologies will be explored. With this, we will demonstrate FTJs compatibility with CMOS electronics. FTJs are based on epitaxial strained oxide ferroelectrics and therefore require specific substrates and high processing temperatures. This hampers the integration of ferroelectric oxides with Si/CMOS. Lattice mismatch, thermal expansion mismatch and chemical stability of the substrate are the main difficulties to be overcome. Here, the challenge is to obtain epitaxial and ferroelectric tunnel barriers with the ferroelectric polarization out-of-plane. SrTiO3 has been regarded as a good template to deposit most of functional oxides, due to the low lattice mismatch with Si and chemical compatibility and films with substrate-like quality can be realized.