Human-induced vibrations on footbridges: A probability-based approach of the vibration serviceability of footbridges under vertical pedestrian loading

In structural design there is a tendency towards more slender and challenging architectural structures. Footbridges become more slender with an increasing high ratio live load to dead weight. A consequence of this increased slenderness of footbridges in an increased susceptibility to human-induced vibrations. The evaluation of the serviceability...

Domain Specific Instruction Set Extensions

Over the past years, a considerable amount of effort has been devoted to the definition and implementation of techniques for the optimization and acceleration of applications on various computing platforms. Among these techniques, the extension of a given instruction-set architecture with custom instructions has become a common approach. Custom...

Trillingen van betonnen voetgangersbruggen / Vibrations of concrete footbridges

Nowadays more and more slender concrete footbridges are designed. Footbridges are designed thinner to increase esthetic value, as well as incorporate sustainability and to reduce building costs, with a consequence that the eigenfrequency of the bridge can drop so low that it may fall into a range of frequencies that is susceptible to vibrations...

Incorporation of the effects of accelerating flow in the design of granular bed protections

For the design of granular bed protections often a stability parameter is used. The stability parameter represents the forces that are acting on the stones and is used to predict the response of the bed to these forces. Existing parameters are often derived for a limited range of application. When the parameter is used outside this range, the...

Control of Voicecoil transducers: Design and implementation of a Motional Feedback Loudspeaker Woofer

This master thesis describes the dynamical behaviour of a loudspeaker woofer and the modelling of it. By the use of the knowledge gained from the model, a feedback controller is implemented in order to enhance the woofer’s performance in terms of acoustic total harmonic distortion (THD) and low frequency bandwidth. The first objective of the...

Low-Cost Smith-Waterman Acceleration

Due to advancing technology, genetic sequencing has become cheaper over the years. This has caused the demand for computational power to grow even faster than Moore's law. To remedy this problem, we analyzed low-cost hardware solutions to parallelize the computational part of the genetic sequencing. We proposed a novel method for calculating the...

Acceleration of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for DNA sequence alignment using an FPGA platform

With the sequencing of DNA becoming cheaper and the resulting stack of data growing bigger, there is a big challenge for both engineer and biologist. Researchers are limited by their computational power. In this thesis, first an overview of sequence alignment algorithms will be given. Then a method to store the values of the similarity score...

Numerical modeling of dam-reservoir interaction seismic response using the Hybrid Frequency–Time Domain (HFTD) method

The research work studies the fundamentals of the Hybrid Frequency-Time Domain (HFTD) method for dynamic analysis of structures, applied to the seismic analysis of dam-reservoir interaction systems. The theoretical consistency and accuracy of the HFTD method, based on the frequency domain Fourier analysis, is demonstrated through all the parts...

Continuous Impedance, Force, and Acceleration Monitoring for Motion Artefact Reduction in EEG

Electroencephalograph (EEG) is used in various applications such as diagnosing patients suffering from epilepsy or seizures. Motion artefact is the noise recorded together with the desired biopotential signals. It is mainly introduced by the relative motion between the measurement electrode and the human scalp. Dry electrodes are preferred in...

Accelerating Graph Analysis with Heterogeneous Systems

Data analysis is a rising field of interest for computer science research due to the growing amount of information that is digitally available. This increase in data has as direct consequence that any analysis is significantly complex. By using structured representations for the data sets, like graphs, the analysis becomes feasible, but is still...

The influence of dredging activities on the morphological development of the Columbia River mouth

This is a numerical modelling study on the impact of dredging and disposal activities on the long-term morphological development of the Columbia River mouth (MCR). Dredging activities removed 120 Mm3 of sand from the MCR during the studied interval between 1958 and 1999. Only one-third of this volume was disposed in the active littoral zone....

Hardware Support for Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration

Dynamically reconfigurable architectures have demonstrated superior performance in comparison to the general-purpose processors. This thesis describes a generic approach for Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) of a reconfigurable platform, connected to a general purpose system through a high-speed interconnect. Thus, the system can dynamically...

Evaluation of changes required in the transmission system to facilitate developments of smart grids

This project is a study into the transmission network system setup of tomorrow in the Netherlands. This work was carried out at TenneT TSO and investigates the Network behavior in response to faults at various locations in the system and the influence of varying electrical generation and loads under four growth scenarios envisaged by TenneT in...

Traffic Accelerator

Model that generates an optimized urban infratructure and morphology to accomodate accelerating traffic

A fundamental study of the Morphological Acceleration Factor

Long-term prediction of sediment transport and morphology has become increasingly important. One of the key issues in carrying out long-term modeling is to bridge the gap between short-term hydrodynamics varying from hours to days, and morphological changes, taking place over much longer periods. Lesser et al. (2004) and Roelvink (2006) have...

Exploring Tile-Based Rasterization Alternatives for Mobile Devices

Investigation on Tile-Based Rasterization on Mobile Devices. External traffic on mobile devices is a major part of power consumption. We start with a critical evaluation of previous work on Tile-Based Rasterization where software was used to reduce external traffic. The added software is now killing the performance of the microprocessor. We...

Using a drinking water treatment simulator for operator training: Accelerating the simulated process leads to an increase in learning

The drinking water treatment industry is becoming increasingly centralized and automated. This requires a different operator training approach then the traditional on the job training. To address this requirement a drinking water treatment plant simulator was developed. A major advantage of such a simulator might be that the normally very slow...

Feasibilty Analysis for Hardware Acceleration of Pattern Recognition Algorithms

This thesis presents a feasibility analysis for hardware acceleration of the pattern recognition algorithms used by the Media Knowledge Engineering department at the Delft University of Technology. The feasibility analysis is conducted on a number of different algorithm classes. The Parzen Window algorithm appeared to be the most suitable option...