Ph.D. Theses

Africa is the world’s least electrified continent, home to three-quarters of the global population without electricity. Electricity generation in African countries today relies heavily on fossil fuels and hydropower, despite the continent’s abundant potential for the most widely accessible renewable energy sources—wind and solar, as Africa is the sunniest continent in the world and has many windy sites. [...]

With ever increasing digital processing capabilities, the analog-to-digital converter moves more and more in the focus of analog integrated circuit design becoming one of the most important building blocks. The progression to modern process technology nodes offers great potential, but comes in general along with an exponential growth in time effort for design, layout and verification. [...]

Human experience and behaviour is subject to multiple different mental processes,which can be separated into cognitive and socio-affective processes. Many studies investigate how experience and behaviour is linked to brain structure and function,and also how much in]luence can be attributed to our genetic makeup. [...]

The continuing depletion of fossil fuels, rising oil prices and the need to reduce CO2 emissions have stimulated intensive research into alternative energy technologies based on renewable and clean sources. Among the various technologies, electrochemical energy storage in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) plays an important role, both for powering a wide range of electronic devices and electric vehicles, and for storing electricity generated from alternative energy sources such as solar and wind. [...]

The cerebral cortex is organized at multiple scales, ranging from ion channels, to neuronal circuitsorganized across cortical layers, to the interconnected network of cortical areas. The structuraland functional properties at these scales vary widely across cortical areas [...]

Recent decades have highlighted the profound consequences of air pollution on air quality and human health, resulting in millions of deaths worldwide and contributing to the intensification of the Earth’s climate due to ongoing anthropogenic emissions. These emissions, originating from densely populated and industrialized regions, lead to the release of gaseous pollutants that undergo chemical transformations in the atmosphere, producing secondary particulate pollutants. [...]

In recent years, many studies have been published on how individual characteristics of pedestrians affect the fundamental diagram. These studies compared cumulative data from individuals within groups that were homogeneous in one characteristic, such as age, but heterogeneous in other factors, such as gender. [...]

High-Entropy Alloys (HEAs) are alloys with at least four principal elements in (near-)equiatomic proportion, which crystallize on simple crystal lattices, such as face-centred cubic, bodycentred cubic, or hexagonal close-packed. These alloys have a stoichiometrically random distribution of constituent elements on all available lattice sites, and they formsingle-phase solid solutions with perfect topological order and complete chemical disorder. [...]