Retail areas in the city: From a place to buy to a place to be

The goal of the project is ‘to make retail areas go from a place to buy to a place to be’. Retail environments have the potential to become a place to be and add value for visitors, the local community and society as a whole. After performing research on various different levels, both quantitative and qualitative and both with consumers and...

The historic quay walls of Amsterdam: A study into the hidden structural capacity of masonry quay walls under the condition of a partly failing foundation

The city of Amsterdam contains about 1600 bridges and 600 kilometres of quay walls. Of these walls, about 200 kilometres are of masonry walls placed on a timber floor and founded on timber piles. These quay walls are sometimes over 100 years old. Due to the increasing loads in the past century and the degrading of material properties in the...

Agile XL in Globally Distributed Environments

Agile is a software development approach based on a set of 4 values and 12 principles. Using this set Scrum was developed as a agile framework in the early 1990s, which still remains the most popular framework today. However, Scrum originated to be used by a small number of co-located teams. When the amount of teams and the distance between the...

Exoskeleton Monitoring System

Project MARCH is designing and building an exoskeleton for paraplegic people in order for them to walk again and participate with it in the 2016 Cybathlon in Zürich. The exoskeleton has many sensors, which acquire data from their surroundings. Project MARCH required a system, which allows for wireless external monitoring of the exoskeleton.

State-of-the-art design methods for wind turbine towers

The costs of wind energy have to be reduced in order to be competitive with conventional methods to generate electricity. The tower costs contribute significantly to the costs of a wind turbine. This thesis aimed to suggest improvements in wind turbine tower design in comparison with industry standards nowadays in order to reduce the costs of...

Economic optimal design of vertical breakwaters

In Europe the interest in and the importance of vertical breakwaters is growing. A central point is the optimal geometry, e.g. the width and height of the breakwater caisson chosen such that the total costs over the lifetime of the structure are minimized. Probabilistic design tools provide several methods to determine the probability of failure...