Opening of the UT Field Lab (formerly Living Innovation Lab) in October 2025

After years of preparation, the UT Field Lab will open in about a month!

"On Thursday afternoon, 2 October, we’re officially opening the brand-new UT FieldLab on campus for all UT staff and those directly involved in the UT FieldLab such as faculty management and sponsors. In the past years we have worked together to develop this unique outdoor facility where research, education, and societal impact come together. As experiment lead you are naturally invited for the opening. The programme for the day is as follows: 

• Starting from 14:00, everybody is welcome to join a guided tour (drop-in, every 10 minutes).
• Around 15:30, we’ll gather for the official programme.
• At 16:00, the central part begins with short talks from key contributors and stakeholders, followed by the official opening by Tom Veldkamp (around 16:45).
• Afterwards: drinks!

📍 Location: Northeastern side of the campus, near the BMC building

Mark van der Meijde, Léon olde Scholtenhuis and Wim Timmermans, coordinators of the UT FieldLab initiative, are taking care of the guided tour. Passing by each experiment, we think each experiment should be represented by an experiment-expert who can provide more in-depth information when needed."

For green infrastructure, I will be bringing some of the sensors, small pieces of layers of a green roof that you can touch, and some visualizations of what the building could look like when the work is finished. Yes, it is still a work in progress, but I expect it to be visitable next year on the roof itself. For now, please join us and learn more about all the experiments happening at the Field Lab.

Student research results - designing and testing a blue-green sloped roof

Our student Iris Laagland finished her MSc thesis on the topic of 'Blue-green for LILa : Designing a Modular Setup for Research regarding Pitched Roofs', where she developed and built a design for a blue green roof during the past year. Images of these designs can be seen below, where different drainage and retention materials and shapes were developed and tested in practice. These are valuable results that we can use to continue future development of blue-green solutions for sloped roofs specifically. The abstract is below and the full thesis is available from the repository here.  

The combination of urbanization and climate change will lead to significant concerns in the foreseeable future, as urbanisation reinforces the effects of climate change. The two major concerns regarding climate change in urban areas are flooding and heat-stress, both of which Blue-Green (BG) infrastructure can offer partial relief to. As the Dutch built urban environment predominantly consists of pitched roofs, there is a need for research regarding the possibilities of applying BG there. A modular setup is designed for Living Innovations Lab (LILa), a fieldlab in development on campus of the University of Twente, offering a platform to perform research on the effectiveness of BG infrastructure on a variety of pitched roof geometries in a semi-controlled research environment. This research platform will provide the possibility to make more informed decisions regarding the implementation of BG in the Dutch built urban environment. 

Initial results blue green roofs and solar panel performance

The initial results for our performance testing are in and so far it is looking both good, and a bit inconclusive. As reported we started measuring at the end of March. The first parameter I am looking at is air temperature, for solar panels placed on a normal roof (first) and on a blue-green roof (second, photo taken when still under construction).

 

The hypothesis is that a blue-green roof with solar panels is cooler during sunshine than a roof with only solar panels. Keep in mind that solar panels operate at best performance at 25◦C. Especially during summer, the cooler temperature will lead to higher performance for the solar panels with blue-green roofs due to evapotranspiration from the vegetation. This is the theory, so let's see what happens in practice.

On the 17th of April at 15:00 we get these example results:

Sensor 1 is above solar panels with blue-green roof, 2 below. 5 above solar panels, 6 below. Expected temperatures from high to low: 5 > 1  and 6 > 2 

If we expand the time series for more inputs we consistently see 6, below the regular solar panels, having the highest extreme temperatures. It is closest to the black flat roof and there might be less wind under the solar panels, thus increasing the heat during the day.

 

 

Examining this more closely for a single day, we see the following:

From this we can conclude that the location below the solar panels (6) is consistently the most extreme hot and cold; Next most extreme is 2 (below solar panels with blue-green roofs. The largest difference between these locations so far has been 5.8 degrees during sun hours and 3.5 degrees during nighttime hours.

Above solar panels with blue-green roofs (1) and above solar panels (5) are difficult to distinguish on a day-to-day basis. The exact impacts should become clearer over time.