The Faculty of Health, Science and Technology

News

• 2026-09-25

  French Students Explore Future Building Materials

  How can recycled wood fibres be used to create sustainable construction materials that also store carbon for long periods of time? This is one of the questions being investigated by two exchange students from France.

  Aylal Gaultier and Robin Grandzinski are engineering students at Supmicrotech in France. They are spending six months at Karlstad University through an international collaboration led by Marcus Vinícius Tavares da Costa, Assistant Professor of Building Technology.

  “Supmicrotech is a French higher education institution that trains engineers, and we would like to strengthen our collaboration with them. Aylal and Robin are currently studying here as exchange students, and we hope to welcome more students to Building Technology in the future,” says Marcus Vinícius Tavares da Costa.

• 2026-09-21

  From Old Clothes to New Fibres

  Every year, millions of tonnes of cotton are produced worldwide, while vast quantities of textiles are discarded or incinerated. Although cotton consists of almost pure cellulose, only a small proportion of the material is recycled into new textiles.

  In her mid-term study, Elise Meurs, an industrially associated PhD candidate in the EXACT Research School, investigates how cellulose pulp derived from recycled cotton behaves during the initial stages of the viscose process, the industrial method used to produce regenerated cellulose fibres. The aim is to enable the large-scale use of textile waste and thereby reduce the need for virgin raw materials from forests or cotton cultivation.

• 2026-09-10

  Research Reveals Where the Internet Really Slows Down

  When a video call stutters, an online game lags, or a webpage feels slow, internet speed is not always the problem. More often, the issue is network delays, known as latency. In his doctoral thesis, Simon Sundberg investigates how such delays arise and develops new methods for measuring them.

  Most people associate network performance with bandwidth, that is, the amount of data that can be transferred per second. However, for many of today’s digital services, latency is just as important.

  “If you are downloading a large film, bandwidth is usually the main factor determining how long it takes. But for interactive services such as video calls, online gaming and virtual reality, latency has a much greater impact on the user experience,” says Simon Sundberg.

• 2026-09-09

  SOLVE Receives Continued Support to Develop Solar Energy Systems

  Karlstad University has been awarded SEK 11.5 million from the Swedish Energy Agency and Region Värmland as the SOLVE research centre enters a new five-year phase. The investment will contribute to the development of future solar energy systems and support Sweden’s transition towards a more sustainable energy system.

  SOLVE brings together universities, businesses and public-sector organisations in research aimed at enabling a faster expansion of solar energy in Sweden. The total budget for SOLVE’s upcoming five-year period amounts to SEK 139.4 million. At Karlstad University, the research focuses on areas including new solar cell technologies, energy communities where several households share locally generated solar electricity, and agrivoltaics, where agricultural production is combined with electricity generation from solar panels.

• 2026-09-08

  Collaboration in Focus as the Knowledge Foundation Visits Karlstad University

  On 7 September, representatives from the Knowledge Foundation (KK-stiftelsen) visited Karlstad University to gain deeper insight into how the university collaborates with industry in research and education. During the visit, several projects were presented in which the university and companies work together to develop new knowledge and strengthen Sweden’s competitiveness.

  Throughout the day, the representatives from the Knowledge Foundation met researchers and academic staff from the Pro2Be research environment and the Department of Computer Science. The aim was to gain a better understanding of how the university works with research, education and skills development in partnership with companies and organisations.

• 2026-09-03

  The Internet's Phone Directory Reveals More Than You Think

  When you enter a web address into your browser and arrive at the correct website a second later, a process takes place that most people never notice. Behind the scenes, one of the internet's most important systems is at work: DNS, the Domain Name System. In his doctoral thesis, computer scientist Jonathan Magnusson investigates how effectively today's DNS infrastructure protects users' privacy and what shortcomings still remain.

  DNS is often described as the internet's address book. The system translates domain names, such as kau.se, into the IP addresses that computers use to communicate with one another. Without DNS, the internet would be far more difficult to use. At the same time, every DNS lookup involves information about the websites a user wants to visit being passed through several different servers.