We collaborate with industry and other research organizations to develop computational methods for generative design, curating design knowledge, and predicting environmental & societal externalities of design decisions. Browse selected research projects below. For a full list of peer-reviewed publications, please refer to Google Scholar.

Generative Design

Knowledge Curation

Predictive Manufacturing

Selected Research Projects

Knowledge Preservation of Retiring Design Experts
Engineering experts with pre-digital age knowledge of applying physics to design are retiring. Simultaneously, gratuitous use of generative AI threatens to bury genuine documentation of design decisions. To address this, we use language models to extract functional information from multimodal engineering documentation and structure problem / solution entities as a design knowledge graph with a user interface.
In collaboration with Nordic Electric Power Technology Company

Digital Twin of Function for Industrial Symbiosis
Circularity is a holy grail of sustainability with an achilles heel when it comes to manufacturing: coupling inputs of one process to the outputs of another renders production vulnerable to slight adjustments. We developed a digital twin representing function to map how changes propagate through an industrial symbiosis.
In collaboration with KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Published at GCSM 2023

Automating Sanitation Policy Evidence Synthesis
Experts in sustainability spend hours reading long policy documents to manually extract evidence of synergy or trade-offs with Sustainable Development Goals. We represent sustainability targets as a structure of design requirements and train language models to extract evidence. This research also focuses on validating extractions with an expert human pool.
In collaboration with Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI)

Extracting Functional Requirements from Design Descriptions
Design documentation lacks consistent structure, may be textually described, and is often sparse. This research applies natural language processing to recursively extract latent problem-solving information trees from unstructured design documentation.
In collaboration with MIT
Published at ASME IDETC 2021

Measuring Functional Coupling with Language Models
Design theory has established standards for good design, but quantifying such metrics can be difficult when requirements are qualitative. This research represents requirements and design parameters using language models by constructing a semantic vector space of the functional domain.
In collaboration with MIT
Published at CIRP Design 2020

Energy Harvesting Footwear Design
Find a source of electric power can be difficult in remote areas. This research involved developing a bidirectional turbine enclosure connected to rubber lungs embedded in a shoe to convert footsteps into electricity.
In collaboration with MIT and Singapore University of Technology & Design
United States Patent 10973276B2

Bi-stable Buckled Beam MEMS Oscillator
Piezoelectric materials can convert mechanical deformation into electric charge, but at the micro-scale their natural resonant frequency is much higher than most ambient vibrations. This research developed a nonlinear piezoelectric oscillator to harvest energy from vibrations below 100Hz.
In collaboration with MIT
Published at Hilton Head Microsystems Workshop 2018

We are part of the Precision and Microsystems Engineering Department in the Faculty of Engineering at TU Delft. More information on degree programs and courses can be found in the department website.

Principal Investigator: Haluk Akay

Haluk is an assistant professor at TU Delft and holds a PhD and MSc in mechanical engineering from MIT, and a BSc in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Haluk conducted postdoctoral research at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and has industry experience in consumer electronic product design and aerospace.

Join our team

We are a new lab at TU Delft, currently assembling an interdisciplinary team of researchers passionate about engineering design and computation.PhD and postdoctoral opportunities will soon be posted on the university's vacancies webpage.MSc students already enrolled at TU Delft interested in thesis projects should contact by email

Chatting with Google CEO and Swedish PM: Haluk discussed the roles of government, industry, and academia in the context of AI innovation in Europe with the Prime Minister of Sweden Ulf Kristersson and the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai at the PM's residence in Stockholm.
May 2023

TEDx Talk: Haluk gave a talk entitled "What might we lose when we start to rely on generative AI?" at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, contemplating the unintended effects of automating thinking with computation.
May 2024

Podcast Guest: Haluk was invited for a conversation on The AI Pod about design, sustainability and AI with host Avid Fayaz. Check out the podcast on Spotify:
February 2024

MIT YouTube: Our energy harvesting footwear invention was featured on the MIT Mechanical Engineering YouTube page with a video shot with our collaborators in Singapore:

MIT Ask an Engineer: Haluk answered questions about using fidget spinners to charge smartphones with this MIT outreach activity.

The Augmented Design Lab is part of the Computational Design & Mechanics section within the Department of Precision & Microsystems Engineering at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of TU Delft.To contact a specific individual at the lab, please refer to our team page.Technology licensing inquiries can be directed to Innovation & Impact @ TU Delft

Join our team

We are a new lab at TU Delft, currently assembling an interdisciplinary team of researchers passionate about engineering design and computation.PhD and postdoctoral opportunities will soon be posted on the university's vacancies webpage.MSc students already enrolled at TU Delft interested in thesis projects should contact by email

Visit us at TU Delft

We are located centrally on TU Delft's campus in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering.Mekelweg 2
2628 CD Delft
The Netherlands