This Junction was conducted on the 13th of December, when we interviewed Dirk-Jan van den Broek. He contributed to about 20 Vonks that appeared between December 2005 to February of 2011. Dirk-Jan takes us back to studying in the 2000’s, what being active at Scintilla was like and describes a typical Vonk article. The Electrical Engineering department was still in the Hogekamp with Applied Physics, the Langezijds was in use as a lecture hall, and some things that never change. ...

In the rubric ‘Afterlife’, Electrical Engineering alumni from the University of Twente look back at their time as a student. They take us along their study time and subsequent career path and share what defined their period at Scintilla and the University of Twente. In this edition: Sheona Sequeira It’s been approximately 1,5 years since I left the University, but honestly it seems like it was yesterday. It seems like yesterday was the day I took a huge leap of faith in myself and decided to move to the Netherlands and straight in to the second year of the Bachelor Electrical Engineering program. ...

Solar Boat Twente was founded in 2016 and has been designing, building, and optimising a very efficient solar-powered boat. We compete in the Solar Sport One Competition with the National Championship in Akkrum and the World Championship in Monaco. Last year, Solar Boat Twente had the fourth most efficient solar-powered boat in the open class of the World Championship. But how do we create such an efficient boat? A large part is the optimised electrical system. ...

Dear Vonk reader, It’s 2023 already! I would like to wish you the best for the coming year. I hope you enjoyed the holidays and kept all your fingers and brain cells. During last New Year’s Eve, I looked back on 2022 with my fellow board members. A lot has happened in the past year. I know that some memories will stay with me for a lifetime. In January, the social world opened up. ...

In the future, we expect most people will drive in electric vehicles daily and, as a result, charge them daily. Our power grid is not designed to handle the load of these vehicles. Therefore, ElaadNL proposed the idea of GridShield [1], a robust backup system that can prevent grid congestion and blackouts in areas where many vehicles charging simultaneously are causing overloads.

You may have seen or read a lot about quantum computers in the past years, like how they have the potential to completely outperform classical computers in terms of computation time for more complex problems. However, the emphasis is on their potential: the main reason we haven’t all thrown our regular computers into the recycling bin and replaced them with quantum computers is that qubits, the quantum equivalent of bits, are extremely unstable. ...