Overview
The TU Delft Hydro Motion Team is a pioneering Dutch engineering collective pushing the boundaries of sustainable marine transportation. Operating out of TU Delft’s famed Dream Hall, the 26-strong student team is designing, building, and racing the world’s first foiling liquid hydrogen-powered boat, with the goal of competing at the Monaco Energy Boat Challenge in July 2026.
To support safe, reliable operation of their innovative propulsion system, the team integrated Metis Engineering’s Cell Guard sensor into their battery monitoring architecture. The sensor provided real-time humidity and temperature data critical to ensuring battery integrity in a demanding marine environment.
The Challenge: Battery Safety in a Demanding Environment
Battery integrity is critical in any electric or hydrogen-hybrid vessel, where harsh marine environments and innovative propulsion systems create unique monitoring challenges. For the Hydro Motion Team, this became particularly evident following a previous incident in which water infiltration caused significant corrosion damage to a battery casing.
“When I designed the battery we used for our liquid hydrogen boat, one of the requirements was that I would be able to monitor the humidity level inside the casing. This requirement is partly due to a previous occasion where water got inside a battery casing and corroded it.” Martijn Koopman, Powertrain Engineer, Hydro Motion Team
The team needed a monitoring solution capable of tracking humidity levels inside the battery enclosure to detect potential water ingress, integrating seamlessly with their existing CAN bus architecture, and delivering reliable data in a demanding marine environment with minimal installation complexity.
The Solution: Metis Engineering Cell Guard
After evaluating the options available, the Hydro Motion Team selected Metis Engineering’s Cell Guard sensor for their battery monitoring requirements. The sensor’s combination of multi-parameter sensing capabilities and straightforward integration made it the ideal choice for the application.
“Your product was an ideal candidate for this since it was able to communicate via CAN bus and was plug and play, no further design needed.” Martijn Koopman, Powertrain Engineer, Hydro Motion Team
The CAN bus interface was particularly important given the team’s complex systems architecture, where multiple devices must communicate reliably and any additional development overhead represents a significant cost in a tight one-year build cycle. The installation process proved equally straightforward: since the team’s primary focus was humidity and temperature monitoring rather than vibration analysis, powertrain engineer Martijn Koopman mounted the sensor directly to a panel using Velcro, bypassing the need for bespoke fixings.
Implementation and Results
The Cell Guard sensor was integrated directly into the Hydro Motion Team’s data visualisation platform, allowing real-time monitoring through their custom web interface. This gave the engineering team immediate access to critical battery condition data during both testing and on-water operations.
The monitoring system quickly revealed useful insights into battery behaviour during use.
“It was interesting to see the temperature and humidity rise whenever we were using the battery.” Martijn Koopman, Powertrain Engineer, Hydro Motion Team
This real-time correlation between operational state and environmental conditions within the battery enclosure helps the team understand their system’s thermal dynamics and verify the integrity of their enclosure sealing. Continuous humidity monitoring provides early warning of potential water ingress, protecting against the type of corrosion damage previously experienced.
While the team initially deployed the Cell Guard primarily for humidity and temperature data, the sensor’s additional accelerometer capability remains available for future development phases.
“At the time, I didn’t have any need for its other functions although it will prove useful in the future.” Martijn Koopman, Powertrain Engineer, Hydro Motion Team
Looking Forward
The Hydro Motion Team’s deployment of the Cell Guard sensor illustrates how purpose-built industrial monitoring technology can integrate cleanly into cutting-edge research applications, supporting ambitious engineering programmes without adding development burden. As the team prepares to race at Monaco in July 2026, the Cell Guard continues to provide the battery health visibility essential to safe and reliable operation of a propulsion system that has never been deployed at this scale before.
The broader ambition extends beyond the race itself. The team is committed to compelling companies and governments to update infrastructure and legislation to accommodate hydrogen-powered vessels, viewing their technical demonstrations as a catalyst for systemic change across the maritime sector.
About the Hydro Motion Team
The Hydro Motion Team traces its origins to 2005, when students at TU Delft first began competing in solar-powered boats under the name TU Delft Solar Boat Team. After years of innovation in solar marine technology, the team claimed its first World Championship title at the Monaco Energy Boat Challenge in 2019, establishing TU Delft as a leading force in sustainable maritime engineering.
In 2020, with solar technology proven and the industry beginning to embrace it, the team set a more ambitious challenge: hydrogen. That year, the Hydro Motion project was born, and the world’s first foiling hydrogen-powered boat was created. Building on this breakthrough, the team won the Open Sea Class of the Monaco Energy Boat Challenge in 2023 and, in 2024, made history as the first hydrogen-powered vessel to cross the North Sea.
In 2025, the team took its most ambitious step yet, switching from compressed hydrogen gas to liquid hydrogen. The transition offered a significant advantage: liquid hydrogen carries three times more fuel for the same volume, dramatically extending the vessel’s range and endurance potential.
Now competing in 2026 under the banner of the Monaco Energy Boat Challenge’s SeaLab Class, the team is aiming to win the international event outright while demonstrating that liquid hydrogen is a viable, scalable fuel for the maritime industry.
“It is about more than just a title; it is about showing what is possible and setting a new standard for maritime energy.” TU Delft Hydro Motion Team
The team is comprised of 26 students from a wide range of disciplines, including Marine Technology, Industrial Design, Aerospace Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, and Molecular Science and Technology. Even students from non-technical backgrounds contribute meaningfully: public administration student Damiaan Bertrams, for instance, manages partner relations, sponsorship, and budget, describing the team’s operation as effectively running a small business.
Team Manager Pépé Becx, 22, recently completed her Bachelor’s in Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management at TU Delft. She grew up sailing and came to Hydro Motion through a passion for the energy transition.
“I grew up sailing and during my studies I became interested in the energy transition. We learned about the production of hydrogen and these processes interest me.” Pépé Becx, Team Manager, TU Delft Hydro Motion Team
The team works from TU Delft’s Dream Hall, a facility shared with six other student dream teams working on projects ranging from exoskeletons for paralysed patients to advanced robotics. With limited funds and a one-year development cycle, each team operates under conditions that push students to perform at an exceptional level.
The Vessel
The 2026 boat is a 7.5-metre-long, 2.5-metre-wide foiling vessel designed specifically for the challenges of the Monaco Energy Boat Challenge, with a focus on endurance, speed, and manoeuvrability. Its defining feature is a set of long hydrofoil struts beneath the hull, a winglike structure that, at speed, generates sufficient lift to raise the boat clear of the water surface, dramatically reducing drag and enabling a cruising speed of around 40 km/h.
Powered by liquid hydrogen, the vessel harnesses the fuel’s high energy density for long-distance travel. Liquid hydrogen must be stored at cryogenic temperatures, presenting significant engineering challenges at the scale of a racing boat. As the liquid warms, pressure builds inside the tank and hydrogen must be vented as a gas, a phenomenon known as boil-off. For the 2026 season, the team’s primary technical focus is capturing this boiled-off gas rather than venting it, using a second, smaller fuel cell to convert it into usable heat and electricity. This approach maximises fuel efficiency and addresses one of the core barriers to liquid hydrogen adoption in small-scale maritime applications.
“We are the first boat at this scale to use liquid hydrogen, so it’s a new challenge we encounter.” Pépé Becx, Team Manager, TU Delft Hydro Motion Team
The hull for the 2026 boat was completed in early 2026, with the full assembly phase following. Water testing is scheduled for May 2026, ahead of the Monaco event in July. Foiling, where the boat lifts fully out of the water, is expected to follow shortly after first sail.
The Monaco Energy Boat Challenge
Organised by the Yacht Club de Monaco and supported by the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, UBS, BMW, and SBM Offshore, the Monaco Energy Boat Challenge is an annual international competition designed to stimulate the development of sustainable propulsion technologies and minimise the environmental impact of the nautical industry. The 2026 edition, the 13th, takes place from 8 to 11 July and will see teams from 29 universities compete in boats they have designed and built themselves.
The Hydro Motion Team is competing in the SeaLab Class, the event’s most experimental category, which brings together six teams working on emerging energy architectures with limited commercial precedent. Prototypes in this class function as floating laboratories, testing new technologies under real operating conditions with the primary goal of advancing collective understanding of future maritime energy systems, rather than pure race performance.
About Hydro Motion Team
The TU Delft Hydro Motion Team (www.hydromotionteam.nl) is a student engineering team advancing sustainable maritime technology through the development of hydrogen-powered vessels. Founded in 2005 as the TU Delft Solar Boat Team, the team has been designing, building, and racing innovative watercraft for two decades, becoming World Champions at the Monaco Energy Boat Challenge in 2023 and completing the first hydrogen-powered North Sea crossing in 2024. Their 2026 entry is the world’s first foiling liquid hydrogen-powered race boat.
About Metis Engineering’s Cell Guard Sensor
The Cell Guard sensor provides comprehensive battery monitoring with multi-parameter sensing including temperature, humidity, and acceleration. With CAN bus connectivity and simple plug-and-play integration, it delivers industrial-grade monitoring in a compact, versatile package suitable for demanding applications from marine environments to motorsports and industrial battery systems.
