Soil-Monopile Interaction: from Elastic to Elastoplastic soil reaction modelling under Quasi-Static Monotonic Loading

Offshore wind energy's rapid expansion underscores the need for accurate and efficient methods to analyze the behavior of monopile foundations supporting wind turbines. While three-dimensional (3D) analyses provide comprehensive insights, their computational demands are significant. As an alternative, one-dimensional (1D) models with spring...

Optimal Steel Temperature Control on the Run-out Table: From single setup to sample control

This thesis investigates the optimization algorithm used for steel temperature control on the run-out table at Tata Steel IJmuiden. The system currently implemented in the finishing mill is called STORM (Smart Temperature Optimization on the Run out table for Mechanical property control) and was created and fully implemented this year. This...

Launch Vehicle First Stage Reusability: a study to compare different recovery options for a reusable launch vehicle

In order to make access to space cheaper, the first stage of a launcher can be recovered. For this research, different options are investigated to make the cost per flight cheaper. Two vehicles are investigated going to two different orbits. The results show that recovering the complete stage is better for vehicles that have a lower separation...

Optimum On-board Abort Guidance based on Successive Convexification for Atmospheric Re-Entry Vehicles

Space safety and hazards reduction techniques are each day becoming more important in the design and operation of space transportation vehicles. One way to mitigate risks is to use advanced guidance strategies to centralise mission planning and guidance-navigation and control. Successive convexification is a technique suitable for this purpose...

Application of an inverse analysis using the Ensemble Kalman Filter method to a deep excavation case: with validation of constitutive soil models

Displacement control is of utmost importance in deep excavation design and is usually based on numerical modelling, e.g. Finite Element Method (FEM). Numerical methods tend to be more conservative when analysing soil behaviour during deep excavation, whereas for practical and economic reasons this is not favoured. The inverse analysis allows for...

Re-entry vehicle aerodynamic database reconstruction from the analysis of test dynamics

During the design and analysis of a mission characterised by re-entry flight, consistent effort and resources are invested in the definition of the aerodynamic database of the re-entry vehicle. An aerodynamic database collects a set of dimensionless coefficients that describe the interaction of the vehicle's geometry and airflow, and an accurate...

Optimizing a Solar Sailing Polar Mission to the Sun: Development and Application of a New Ant Colony Optimizer

In the context of metaheuristic global optimization, we present the definition and development of two new ant colony optimizers (ACO): a single-objective mixed-integer one, called ACOmi, and a multi-objective hypervolume-based one, called MHACO. In particular, after having performed a verification and validation phase over a wide set of problems...

Design Optimisation: Computationally Optimised Bridge Design

The computational optimisation process have been used in the structural design for long time now. Even though it occasionally appears in architectural practice, it has not yet been completely developed and its full potential has not yet been recognised.<br/><br/>In order to further explore the potential of computational optimisation in...