Looking back, advancing ahead

The year 2025 has been twelve exciting months where TPRC’s growth has come to bloom since 2023.

The plans, drafted three to four years ago leading to our participation in the National Growth Fund projects “NXTGEN-HT” and “Luchtvaart in Transitie”, and RVO’s TSH Aircraft Manufacturing Industry project “FENIKS” are now operational in full force. We have been building, shaping and tuning our team and our laboratory. As such, we are enormously proud with a more than 50% growth of projects and people since the beginning of 2023 and doubled laboratory space to accommodate our colleagues and equipment.

Over fifty individuals are now working at the TPRC or are intimately involved, including our staff, PhD candidates, research engineers, MSc and BSc interns and student assistants. We noted fifteen different nationalities in 2025, which truly enriches our personal lives, boosts our sense of globalization and inclusivity and promotes different views on the research that we perform.

We are incredibly happy with the restructuring of our laboratory and the investments made, which enable us to continue delivering the quality standard that we have set in the past fifteen years. Investments, for which we acknowledge our industrial partners and the Dutch government. Thanks to their support, we have set up a dedicated welding laboratory, a physical and digital infrastructure for processing-related material characterization and a recycling line including compounding, mixing, moulding and analysis of reclaimed thermoplastic composites in the past year.

We find ourselves in an ideal position between academia and the aerospace industry at the TPRC. As researchers, we have the independence to solve fundamental problems in thermoplastic composites manufacturing, to build process design tools and to disseminate our results. Our industrial partners provide direction and relevance, and take the created knowledge, guidelines and models home to upscale to higher technology or manufacturing readiness levels.