As the solar industry continues to grow, the accumulation of photovoltaic (PV) module waste highlights the pressing need for more circular and repairable designs. Conventional laminated modules are difficult to disassemble and recycle, which limits both material recovery and component reuse. While avoiding the lamination improves disassembly, it also compromises the module’s mechanical integrity. This trade-off demands a careful redesign to maintain structural requirements without sacrificing key criteria such as repairability, weight, and cost. This study presents a reliability based optimization approach to redesign the PV module while balancing repairability, weight, and cost constraints. A semi-quantitative relative repairability assessment method, tailored specifically for PV modules, was developed to quantify repairability impacts of design changes. Using Robustimzer software, reliability-base optimization was incoporated to account for uncertain scenarios during the life cycle of the product. Finite Element Analysis and prototype verification ensured compliance with IEC61215 mechanical load standards, achieving an optimized design for mass, repairability and costs simultaneously. As a case study, this methodology was applied to a laminate-free module developed by Biosphere Solar, demonstrating how repairability-focused design can be effectively balanced with structural and economic requirements. The proposed approach offers a scalable framework for advancing sustainable design practices in the PV industry.

Hydrofoil crafts with fully submerged foils can provide fast and economical waterway transport. However, their operation requires reliable onboard control systems to ensure the safety and comfort of their passengers, especially in rough sea conditions. This thesis project is focused on the dynamical modelling and the design of motion control systems for an experimental scale hydrofoil craft that is available at TU Delft, namely the Hydrofoil Education and Research Platform (HEARP).

The development of the dynamical model of HEARP is done by taking inspiration from the dynamics of marine crafts and aircraft and relying on different assumptions to obtain a simple and low-order model. The resulting model is a linearized state-space model with three degrees of freedom, namely heave, roll, and pitch, and includes the influence of regular waves. Because of inaccurate available data for the mass properties of HEARP, variations of the system parameters due to nonlinearities, and changes in the operating conditions, different uncertainties are assigned to most system parameters.

The use of multivariable feedback control methods for the motion control of hydrofoil crafts is limited, so this work is focused on exploiting such methods to improve the performance and robustness of such systems. The representation of the perturbed system using real parametric uncertainties is proved to be computationally expensive for the control design. Thus, the perturbed system is approximated by complex (dynamic) perturbations. A signal-based H-infinity optimal controller is designed using the nominal system, and a mu-synthesis optimal robust controller is designed using the approximated perturbed system.

The performance and robustness of the proposed controllers are evaluated in both frequency and time domains through simulations. From the results, it is concluded that both controllers offer high-performance system responses for both reference tracking and disturbance rejection of incident waves. Furthermore, by comparing the two controllers, it is observed that the mu-synthesis controller shows superior robustness for the modelled uncertainty. In contrast, the H-infinity controller has a slightly better performance when considering the perturbed systems with the real parametric uncertainty. The results of this thesis project can be used in the future to experimentally validate the accuracy of the proposed dynamical model and the performance of the designed controllers.