What makes meat substitutes (un)attractive for Dutch consumer segments?: A Stated Choice Experiment

The livestock sector accounts for 14-15% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, the current meat consumption patterns are associated with multiple health risks and are unsustainable in the long term. Therefore, the shift to a more plant-based diet and reduced animal-source intake is desired from a societal perspective. One attempt...

Learning dynamic models of soft manipulators via physics-inspired neural networks

Soft robots are made of compliant materials, which increase their flexibility but also presents modeling challenges. The difficulty mainly comes from material nonlinearity, infinite degrees of freedom, uncertain parameters, and complex calculations. This project uses physics-inspired neural networks to solve the last two problems. Based on the...

Non-Consensus Opinion Models with Byzantine Nodes

Opinion dynamics models study how the interaction among people influences the opinion formation process. In most opinion dynamics models, only one opinion could exist in the steady state, which is different from the real-life opinion formation process. In 2009, Shao \emph{et al.} introduced a non-consensus opinion (NCO) model, which allows...

Characterizing coastal wind speed gradients using Scanning LiDAR data and mesoscale modeling

This research attempts to investigate the coastal flow structure horizontally. The flow cases with different flow directions, including perpendicular and parallel to the shoreline directions, are selected by analyzing the New Europe Wind Atlas (NEWA) reanalysis data. After the cases are determined, high-resolution Weather Research and...

Perspective Discovery in Controversial Debates: An exploration of unsupervised topic models

Since the introduction of the Web, online platforms have become a place to share opinions across various domains (e.g., social media platforms, discussion fora or webshops). Consequently, many researchers have seen a need to classify, summarise or categorise these large sets of unstructured user-generated content. A field related to this task is...

An Investigation of the Medical Ultrasound Image Sparse Spaces used for the Model-Based Imaging

In this thesis, we investigate a sparse basis for ultrasound images, so that we can use sparse regularization in imaging. Actually, there are few previous researches explicitly demonstrating that medical ultrasound images can be sparsified for some dictionary. We consider various orthogonal transforms such as wavelet transforms, cosine...

Modelling of Grain Boundary Segregation for Nanocrystalline Alloys: Applied to Pd-based Alloys

The Pd-based metal membranes have been focused on many studies, because they are the most promising candidates for hydrogen separation. If Pd-based membranes are designed in nanoscale, then the introduced high volume fraction of grain boundaries can act as fast diffusion paths for hydrogen atoms that leading to an increase of hydrogen separation...

Night and Fog of Hong Kong: Balancing development and polycentric urban model exploration of Hong Kong in Pearl River Delta, Urban regeneration strategies in search for improving cohesion at Tin Shui Wai new town within the Hong Kong extended region

Due to the restricted functional collaboration between Hong Kong and Shenzhen Region as well as Pearl River Delta, the functional construction of Hong Kong Region becomes a mono-centric system which leads to a serious unbalanced development between its city centre and its peripheral new towns with great potential. However, the new planning...

Numerical modeling of hydrodynamic circulation in Lake Taihu

This study is aiming to improve the understanding of hydrodynamic circulation in large shallow lakes. The Lake Taihu, the third largest lake in east China, is picked up as the study area for three reasons. The basin of Lake Taihu is considered as the most populated and developed area as a backyard of Shanghai. Lake Taihu is a typical shallow...

Technologies and Business Model Explorations for Risks and Performances Management in Dutch Commercial Buildings

Priva is a Dutch company in the field of indoor control and automation. Its two main business segments are commercial building control and greenhouse control. In the commercial building segment, Priva’s business currently specializes in Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) control, floor control and energy management.However,...

Validation of Eddy Current Loss Models for Permanent Magnet Machines with Concentrated Windings

Modelling CO2 Foam Displacements for Enhanced Oil Recovery

Increasing demand for oil in the near future implies the need for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods to produce the remaining oil after primary and secondary production. Miscible gas injection has an excellent microscopic sweep efficiency; however due to density difference, high gas mobility and reservoir heterogeneity, the macroscopic sweep...

Swell propagation in a natural coastal channel in the SWAN model

Compare the 1D spectrum computed in SWAN (Svasek, 2007) with it measured by buoy OS4 in the Oosterschelde Estuary, serious underestimation of wave energy can be found on low-frequency band. Investigation has been performed to find the possible reasons for the missing energy on low frequency part. In this study, diffraction is hypothesized as the...