Karin Yu wins the HILTI Prize

Karin Yu's Master thesis, titled «Distributed Virtual Sensing via Bayesian Filtering for Wind Energy Structures» has been awarded this year's Download Hilti Prize for Innovative Research (PDF, 399 KB).

Hilti AG offers the Hilti Prize for Innovative Research to encourage practice-oriented research at ETH Zurich.
Prizes are conferred upon Master’s and doctoral theses in the areas of engineering sciences or physics combining truly outstanding scientific content with application orientation.

In this thesis, Ms. Yu developed a framework, which allows to assess the condition and possible faults on wind turbine structures on the basis of monitoring information. The developed concept, involved significant methodological developments, further resulting in a framework of high practical significance, since it delivers an early warning system to detect structural defects and track the accumulation of fatigue damage. The goal of this thesis was to simultaneously estimate spatially distributed loads (e.g. wind or wave loads acting on an offshore turbine), as well as the full-field vibration response. It accomplished this by combining Bayesian filtering (essentially a way to take data into account, feasibly in real-time) with physics-based engineering models of the turbine, and data-driven Gaussian processes, which were used to carry out prediction of spatially distributed loads.

The award ceremony will take place on ETH-Tag, Saturday, 18 November 2023. 

Karin is an ETH AI Center fellow and current doctoral candidate of the Chair of Structural Engineering – Concrete Structures and Bridge Design at ETH Zurich and our Chair of Structural Mechanics and Monitoring at ETH Zurich.

The thesis was carried out under joint supervision with Konstantinos Tatsis, Vasilis Dertimanis (members of our Chair), and Andrew Smyth (Columbia University).