This study investigates the detection of micro-scale damage in metallic structures using neural networks with sparse sensor configurations and a limited number of training samples. The performance of different neural network architectures is compared for damage detection, complemented by a vibration-based damage metric for damage localization. ... Read more

Automated mobility solutions are rapidly advancing globally, offering potential benefits in safety, sustainability, efficiency, and inclusivity. However, these benefits are not guaranteed and could decrease if improperly managed. This paper introduces the Fast Automated and Smart mobility impact Tool (FAST), a method to assess and visualize automated mobility's impact on travelers and society. Developed through an iterative design process involving literature review, tool design, and expert validation, FAST enables rapid initial assessments to stimulate discussion and inform decision-making. Preliminary validation shows potential but highlights the need for objective clarification, impact indicator refinement, and improved user group distinctions. Future work includes additional validation, framework elaboration, and interactive tool development to better support policy makers, researchers, and designers in evaluating automated mobility options. FAST can empower UI researchers to initiate dialogue with policy makers and industry, steering toward meaningful human-machine interactions, improving travel behavior, and facilitating acceptance of desired automated mobility futures. ... Read more

Dutch hospital buildings face increasing cooling demand under projected 2050 climate conditions, while patient rooms must provide stable thermal comfort for users with different levels of vulnerability, activity, and adaptive capacity. This thesis investigates how passive and hybrid cooling strategies at the patient-room scale can support occupant-centred thermal comfort, reduce cooling demand, and contribute to climate-resilient healthcare design.

The research combines a literature review, EnergyPlus-based simulations, and stakeholder interviews. The literature review establishes the building-physics and thermal-comfort basis for passive and hybrid cooling. Subsequently, a representative Dutch hospital patient room is simulated under morphed 2050 climate conditions, using operative temperature, SET, PMV/PPD, cooling load, and active cooling hours for staff, mobile patients, and bedridden patients. Finally, stakeholder interviews examine how passive and hybrid cooling strategies are currently understood, constrained, and implemented in healthcare design practice.

The results show that passive envelope measures reduce transmitted solar radiation by up to 80%, but remain insufficient when internal heat gains, continuous occupancy, and thermal storage dominate the room heat balance. Natural ventilation provides intermittent comfort benefits, whereas hybrid cooling with local air movement enables a higher mechanical cooling setpoint and reduces the ideal cooling load under the tested assumptions.

The interviews show that implementation is constrained by fragmented requirements, risk-averse decision-making, infection-prevention concerns, cost allocation, and an installation-led design culture. This thesis therefore concludes that passive cooling should not replace mechanical cooling in hospitals, but should form part of a passive-first hybrid design philosophy: reducing heat gains, managing internal loads, supporting heat dissipation, and using active systems as a controlled fallback rather than the default starting point. ... Read more

Most oncology programmes fail pre-clinically, so experiment order determines how much is spent before termination. Yet pre-clinical development is conventionally modelled as one gate with one probability of success, which cannot order experiments. Question-based clinical development (QBCD) instead splits stages into the questions a programme must answer. This thesis applies QBCD to the pre-clinical phase and separates two sources of value: the gate premium from finer staging and the engine premium from a binomial real-options lattice. To our knowledge, no published application separates these effects.

One pre-clinical immuno-oncology asset was valued in a 2×2 factorial design crossing two engines, a risk-adjusted decision tree and a binomial lattice, with two paths, conventional phases and six company-elicited question gates. Both paths shared total cost, duration and probability of success, and both engines the same discount rate. Question order and concurrency were searched exhaustively under precedence constraints, with sensitivity, Monte Carlo and four-indication robustness checks.

Decomposing the pre-clinical block added €4.15 M (17.1 % of the phase-based €24.25 M), whereas the lattice added €0.13 M (0.5 %), a thirty-two-fold difference. Continuing was worth about four times the gate cost even at the tightest gate, so abandonment was rarely optimal and a lattice earns its place mainly on marginal assets. Discounting the lattice at a lower rate than the tree, as published comparisons often do, inflated the engine premium 500-fold.

The optimal ordering was reproduced by sorting questions on ascending cost-to-failure ratio, a 1960 rule this thesis extends to a discounted form, so finding the best sequence is a sort, not a search. Re-ordering the company plan was worth €0.79 M and running questions concurrently added €2.05 M, together 10.0 % of the original plan’s value. Of the 28.8 % increase an rNPV appraisal would report, only that 10.0 % is under the team’s own control. Across 10 000 Monte Carlo scenarios, the question-based tree was worth starting in 97.5 % of cases and the phase-based tree in 76.3 %, and the discounted rule matched the exhaustive optimum in every scenario.

Three decisions follow. Order experiments by ascending cost-to-failure ratio and run them concurrently where precedence allows. Admit an extra experiment only if it lifts a later gate’s probability of success enough to repay its cost and the delay it imposes. Act on differences between execution plans, not on absolute valuations or the choice of engine. What an asset is worth at this stage cannot be established with certainty, but what should be done next can. ... Read more

Single junction crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells are reaching their practical efficiency limit while perovskite/c-Si tandem solar cells have achieved efficiencies above the theoretical limit of single junction c-Si solar cells. Next to low-thermal budget silicon heterojunction architecture, high-thermal budget carrier-selective passivating contacts (CSPCs) based on polycrystalline-SiO x (poly-SiO x ) also constitute a promising architecture for high efficiency perovskite/c-Si tandem solar cells. In this work, we present the development of c-Si bottom cells based on high-temperature poly-SiO x CSPCs and demonstrate novel high-efficiency four-terminal (4T) and two-terminal (2T) perovskite/c-Si tandem solar cells. First, we tuned the ultra-thin, thermally grown SiO x . Then we optimized the passivation properties of p-type and n-type doped poly-SiO x CSPCs. Here, we have optimized the p-type doped poly-SiO x CSPC on textured interfaces via a two-step annealing process. Finally, we integrated such bottom solar cells in both 4T and 2T tandems, achieving 28.1% and 23.2% conversion efficiency, respectively. ... Read more