Doctoral Thesis
Recent Submissions
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Impacts and uncertainty of climate change on mountain hydrology and its extremes: An approach using high-resolution stochastic climate simulations
(2014)This thesis delves into the hydrological responses of mountainous catchments in the Swiss Alps to climate change, with a particular emphasis on understanding and underscoring the importance of spatial variability, uncertainties in projections, and the impact of intensified extreme rainfall. Initially, the study explores the significant spatial variability in hydrological responses at the sub-catchment level, driven by changes in precipitation ...Doctoral Thesis -
Intelligent Additive Manufacturing: a Holistic Approach to the Optimization of Data-Poor Complex Processes
(2024)Additive manufacturing has introduced unprecedented novelty to the way we conceive, design, and produce objects. Additive processes offer several advan- tages over traditional manufacturing methods, such as design freedom, material and resource efficiency, and shortened supply chains. However, a large gap ex- ists between the theoretical capabilities of additive manufacturing and its current implementations. Numerous additive manufacturing ...Doctoral Thesis -
Design of modular and responsive hydrogels for drug delivery using supramolecular interactions
(2024)Currently, therapeutics delivery relies heavily on systemic oral or intravenous administration to the patient. To reduce off-site effects and possible premature degradation of the therapeutics, drug delivery platforms are being engineered to enable local, sustained and controlled delivery of therapeutics. Hydrogels have shown their potential as drug delivery platforms because of their biocompatibility, high water content, and ease of ...Doctoral Thesis -
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Dynamics of Wetting and Adhesion on Soft Substrates
(2024)The ubiquity of soft materials in our daily experiences, in addition to their growing importance in industrial applications, makes understanding their behavior of great interest. As research into contact between material interfaces shifted more towards compliant materials, it became clear that their behavior during contact differed from that of stiffer materials. The classical continuum mechanics model that had originally been developed ...Doctoral Thesis -
Efficient Simulation of Tracer Transport in Fractured Porous Media and Data-Driven Aperture Estimation
(2024)Subsurface applications such as geothermal heat extraction or CO2 sequestration are vital for solving today's energy and climate challenges. Their reservoir rock typically consists of fractured porous media, whose fractures can greatly affect flow, transport, and mechanics. Accurate and efficient modelling of the relevant physical processes and characterising the related parameters are crucial for performance estimation and risk assessment. ...Doctoral Thesis -
Isotope-Enabled Insights into Water Fluxes in Forest Ecosystems
(2024)Soils play an essential role in the 'critical zone' as a temporary storage reservoir for water, providing it later for plant transpiration, evaporation, groundwater recharge, or streamflow. Soil-stored water constitutes the primary source of transpiration for trees. The size of the storage reservoir, determined by soil and root properties, is crucial to the duration it can supply transpiring vegetation. Changes in rainfall frequency and ...Doctoral Thesis -
Software-Inspired Techniques for Digital Hardware Security
(2024)We entered an era where new hardware flourishes at an unprecedented pace and with unseen diversity. We are also living in an era where security and safety are paramount, and where the potential impact of a single bug can be catastrophic. Hence, we urgently need foundations to detect as many hardware bugs as possible before their deployment. Hardware validation is universally recognized as complex, expensive and tedious. Despite genuine ...Doctoral Thesis -
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Advancing the mechanistic understanding of CaO-based sorbents for CO2 capture
(2024)Doctoral Thesis -
Evaluating the effect of vegetation in urban microclimate using remote sensing technologies
(2024)At present time, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and many regions of the world are experiencing rapid urbanization. The increasing urbanization combined with the effects of climate change have resulted in the intensification of urban heat islands. Urban heat islands decrease outdoor thermal comfort and create feedback loops on energy consumption. Furthermore, the more frequent temperature extremes directly impact ...Doctoral Thesis -
Bridging The Gap: School-to-Work Transitions and Youth Labor Market Dynamics in Informal Economies
(2024)Doctoral Thesis -
Investigations on Wood- and Wood-Hybrid-Joints and their Moisture Stability
(2024)Wood is a highly valued, renewable resource with excellent mechanical properties. However, the natural heterogeneity of wood and its dimensional restrictions limit the use of wood in its natural state. Engineered wood products (EWP) have been developed to overcome or improve those limitations by assembling smaller wood pieces into larger structures. Especially adhesive-bonded EWPs allow for increased utilization of wood in construction ...Doctoral Thesis -
Enhancing Physical Interactions of Untethered Miniature Magnetic Robots for Biomedical Applications
(2024)Doctoral Thesis -
Optimization of the High-Intensity Muon Beamlines for MEG~II, Mu3e and HIMB
(2024)Doctoral Thesis -
Characterizing liquid-solid phase transitions for mechanistic model-based process design
(2024)Freezing, freeze-drying and crystallization are central to the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals. They all involve a phase transition from the liquid to the solid, and it is the inherent complexity of this transition that renders process design challenging. This thesis aims to deepen the mechanistic understanding of the liquid-solid phase transition and to utilize the knowledge gained for rational process design. It has ...Doctoral Thesis -
Advanced-Glycation-Endproducts cross-linking in collagen fibrils - a nanoscale study on tissue
(2024)Doctoral Thesis -
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A Scientific Event Camera: Theory, Design, and Measurements
(2024)This thesis explores the physical limits of neuromorphic event cameras and proposes a novel highly-sensitive event camera targeting scientific applications. Certain scientific applications, such as fluorescent imaging of neural activity (especially voltage imaging), as well as tracking of particles/objects moving at high speed, require vision sensors operating near the limits of physics. These applications consist in the detection of ...Doctoral Thesis