Publications related to Engineering design process

Models implemented in the methodological approach to design the initial STEP first wall contour

Davide Galassi, Kevin Henricus Annemarie Verhaegh, Filippo Bagnato, Dario Vaccaro

The official Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production mission aims to demonstrate the ability to generate net electricity from fusion with the STEP Prototype Power plant. One of the key technological and engineering challenges in fusion power plants is mana ...

Elsevier Science Sa2024

Co-Design Optimisation of Morphing Topology and Control of Winged Drones

Dario Floreano, Valentin Wüest, Fabio Bergonti

The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient solution. However, m ...

IEEE2024

A Dual-Channel Gate Driver Design with Active Voltage Balancing Circuit for Series Connection of SiC MOSFETs

Drazen Dujic

Dual-channel gate driver is commonly utilized in the industry for accommodating the widespread use of half-bridge power modules. As wide-bandgap devices become increasingly prevalent due to their superior switching characteristics compared with conventiona ...

2024

Instabilities in Elastic and Magneto-Elastic Beams and Shells: from Shell Buckling to the Design of a Programmable Braille Reader

Arefeh Abbasi

In this thesis, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into structural instabilities of both elastic and magneto-elastic beams and shells, resulting in a creative proposal to design a programmable braille reader. Methodologically, we combine numerical si ...

EPFL2024

RE:SLAB — a load bearing system for open-ended component reuse in building structures

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Jan Friedrich Georg Brütting, Dario Redaelli, Edisson Xavier Estrella Arcos, Alex-Manuel Muresan

The construction industry plays a major role in the high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, resource consumption, and waste generation observed nowadays. Key to the circular economy, structural component reuse arises as a promising solution to divert cons ...

2024

Reuse of cut concrete slabs in new buildings for circular ultra-low-carbon floor designs

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Numa Joy Bertola, Célia Marine Küpfer

The study explores an original idea that responds to the urgent need to reduce the detrimental environmental impacts of load-bearing floor construction in new buildings by reusing saw-cut reinforced concrete (RC) pieces salvaged from soon-to-be demolished ...

2024

Dated: Guidelines for Creating Synthetic Datasets for Engineering Design Applications

Jürg Alexander Schiffmann, Cyril Picard, Faez Ahmed

Exploiting the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, showcased by ChatGPT and DALL-E, in real-world applications necessitates vast, domain-specific, and publicly accessible datasets. Unfortunately, the scarcity of such datasets poses a significan ...

Amer Soc Mechanical Engineers2023

Leveraging the Snap Buckling of Bistable Magnetic Shells to Design a Refreshable Braille Dot

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Arefeh Abbasi, Tian Chen, Bastien Freddy Gustave Aymon

A design concept is proposed for the building block, a dot, of programmable braille readers utilizing bistable shell buckling, magnetic actuation, and pneumatic loading. The design process is guided by Finite Element simulations, which are initially valida ...

Wiley2023

A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Conversational Agents in Digital Education

Juan Carlos Farah

The presence of conversational agents (or chatbots) in educational contexts has been steadily increasing over the past few years. Recent surveys have shown widespread interest in the use of chatbots in education, both for research and practice. Although th ...

EPFL2023

Risk of incorrect choices due to uncertainty in BPS evaluations of conceptual-stage neighbourhood-scale building designs

Marilyne Andersen, Luisa Pastore, Minu Agarwal

At the conceptual stage, building performance simulation (BPS) based evaluations are being increasingly used for tasks such as ranking of competing massing design proposals. However, such conceptual stage evaluations suffer from information deficiency in b ...

2023

An Ontology-based Engineering system to support aircraft manufacturing system design

Jinzhi Lu, Xiaochen Zheng

During the conceptual design phase of an aircraft manufacturing system, different industrial scenarios need to be evaluated against performance indicators in a collaborative engineering process. Domain experts' knowledge and the motivations for decision-ma ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2023

Performance of the Cable-in-Conduit Conductors for Super-X Test Facility

Kamil Sedlák

Following the conceptual design, the engineering design of the dc magnet and cable-in-conduit conductor (CICC) for the Super-X test facility has been done in 2021. Totally three types of conductors with different structures were designed for the three pair ...

IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2023

Making Bridges Sustainable

Eugen Brühwiler

Lack of incentives mainly explains why the implementation of novel methods and technologies in bridge engineering practice is generally postponed by the engineering community despite the urgent need to advance also bridge engineering to meet the objectives ...

Taylor and Francis / CRC Press2023

Interlocking modular microfluidic cooling substrates for future high energy physics experiments

Massimo Angeletti

In high energy physics, semiconductor-based sensors are widely used in particle tracking applications. These sensors are typically glued on low-mass cooling substrates, which guarantee the correct thermal management and, at the same time, minimise their in ...

EPFL2023

What Role Do Tangibles Play in Fostering Design Thinking Skills? An Exploratory Study

Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Yousef Jalali, Natascia Petringa, Mary Jean Bürer

Despite the importance of using artifacts during the design thinking process, there is a limited understanding of the influence of tangibles with lower perceptual richness on design thinking skills within educational settings. It is speculated that tangibl ...

2023

Carbon budgets at the component scale and their impacts on design choices: the façade as a case study

Marilyne Andersen, Thomas Bernard Paul Jusselme, Nazanin Rezaei Oghazi

In accordance with the Paris agreement, the Swiss Climate Strategy (SCS) defines the net-zero target to be reached before 2050, which demands for a thoughtful carbon budget allocation between the different contributors. Ongoing normalization tasks are curr ...

2023

An Integrated Approach to Designing Robust Turbocompressors on Gas Bearings Through Surrogate Modeling and Constrained Multi-Objective Optimization

Jürg Alexander Schiffmann, Soheyl Massoudi, Cyril Picard

Designing turbocompressors is a complex and challenging task, as it involves balancing conflicting objectives such as efficiency, stability, and robustness against manufacturing deviations. This paper proposes an integrated design methodology for turbocomp ...

ASME Amer Soc Mechanical Engineers2023

TRACE: A Conceptual Model to Guide the Design of Educational Chatbots

Denis Gillet, Maria Jesus Rodriguez Triana, Juan Carlos Farah, Sandy Ingram, Fanny Kim-Lan Lasne, Adrian Christian Holzer

Driven by the rising popularity of chatbots such as ChatGPT, there is a budding line of research proposing guidelines for chatbot design, both in general and specifically for digital education. Nevertheless, few researchers have focused on providing concep ...

Springer2023

DRONE GAME THAT HIGHLIGHTS ETHICAL AND SUSTAINABILITY IMPLICATIONS OF DESIGN DECISIONS

Siara Ruth Isaac, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Gianni Lodetti, Barbara Bruno

This paper reports on the development of a brief scenario-based challenge to prompt engineering students’ reflection about the broader impacts of their design decisions, and thereby increase their ethical sensitivity and motivation. The game scenario asks ...

CDIO conference proceedings2023

3D Printed Acoustically Programmable Soft Microactuators

Mahmut Selman Sakar, Murat Kaynak, Amit Yedidia Dolev

The concept of creating all-mechanical soft microrobotic systems has great potential to address outstanding challenges in biomedical applications, and introduce more sustainable and multifunctional products. To this end, magnetic fields and light have been ...

2023