Assessment of bolted connections for supporting structures of offshore wind turbine towers: Mechanical performance and structural health monitoring

In the past two decades, offshore wind has emerged as a new source of renewable energy. This highlights the requirement for the utilisation of larger and more efficient offshore wind turbines (OWTs). The connections used in support structures of OWTs are critical to ensure the excellent structural performance of OWFs. An alternative option is...

Urn models and other approaches to risk and tails, with applications in risk management and climatology

This dissertation collects three scientific contributions, already published in international peer-reviewed journals, plus some extra considerations and work-in-progress. First, we present a model based on reinforced urn processes, which conjugates to the right-censored recovery process, and empirically apply it to the time series of recovery...

A semi-continuous formulation for goal-oriented reduced-order models

Modern computational and experimental techniques can represent the detailed dynamics of complex systems using large numbers of degrees of freedom. To facilitate human interpretation or the optimal design of control systems, however, reduced-order models (ROMs) are required. Conventional reduced-order modeling techniques, such as those based on...

Localization in Dutch dune sand and organic clay. New insight into localization mechanisms

One of the challenging research puzzles in soil mechanics is the subject of strain localization. The investigation of the physico-chemical mechanisms and the conditions under which the strain will localize has been going on for more than a century. The focus of these studies was continuously adapted as new engineering problems occurred or new...

A reliability based design methodology for extreme responses of offshore wind turbines

Design and implementation of an image understanding system: DADS