Student Projects
Student projects at IFD are usually closely related to current research projects and are supervised by our doctoral students, lecturers and professors. Some projects are conducted in collaboration with academic and industrial partners.
The Process
At IFD we try to assign the projects according to the students' preferences. To make sure that you get the project of your choice, it is best to contact us as soon as possible and preferably a few weeks before the semester starts. For a list of available projects, see the list below.
On the first Friday of each semester, IFD organizes an information event for students who are starting a project at IFD. The event is a great opportunity to meet other students, IFD faculty members, and supervisors. Moreover, detailed information about how student projects are conducted at IFD is given (Download student project guidelines (PDF, 3.3 MB)). Specifics about the event are provided by student supervisors.
Presentations of Bachelor, semester and CSE seminar thesis projects usually take place during the last week of the semester in the room ML H 51 ("Treibhaus"). Master thesis presentation dates are setup individually depending on the corresponding starting dates. Selected posters of projects are showcased on the H-floor of the ML building (poster templates for Download LaTeX (ZIP, 551 KB) and Download MS Word (DOCX, 353 KB) are available).
Snow Saltation Measurements in the Field
Saltating snow is an important phenomenon of mass transport over the snow cover, impacting various processes governing the snowpack evolution. Key to the accurate modelling of snow saltation is the mass flux of snow and shear distribution under drifting and blowing snow conditions. This project will consider field measurements of snow saltation outdoors in the Swiss Alps. The student will build and reproduce an existing snow saltation tracking system using available camera equipment and collocate measurements with a new outdoor holography setup to perform airborne particle characterization. This will acquire novel field data to study mechanisms of snow saltation coupled to sublimation in the near-ground surface layer.
Keywords
Snow Saltation, Drifting and Blowing Snow, Sublimation, Holography, Particle Tracking, Field Measurements
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Semester Project , Internship , Bachelor Thesis , Master Thesis , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2025-11-25 , Earliest start: 2025-08-08 , Latest end: 2026-05-31
Applications limited to ETH Zurich , EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Organization Group Coletti
Hosts Muller Koen , Coletti Filippo
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology , Earth Sciences , Physics
Investigating Fiber Clustering in Q2D Turbulence
Buoyant plastic-like debris can accumulate at the water surface into persistent particle islands, but the underlying clustering mechanisms remain unclear. This project will experimentally investigate how floating, anisotropic particles (fibers/rods) interact and cluster on the free surface of a quasi-two-dimensional turbulent flow. A Q2D facility with electromagnetic forcing, together with combined PIV/PTV measurements, will link particle aggregation to surface flow structures and systematically varied flow/particle parameters, yielding quantitative metrics for surface-clustering dynamics.
Keywords
plastic pollution; floating particles; quasi-2D turbulence; capillary interactions; clustering;
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Semester Project , Bachelor Thesis , Master Thesis , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2025-11-10 , Earliest start: 2026-02-15 , Latest end: 2026-08-16
Organization Group Coletti
Hosts Lüthi Simon
Topics Engineering and Technology
3-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network for semantic segmentation
X-ray micro-computed tomography is an imaging technique enabling interior characterization of material micro-structures. The incident waves penetrate through the sample and are attenuated by the material density to be absorbed by a detector, represented by a quantized greyscale value. By rotating the sample and iteratively recording radiographic projections, internal boundaries between material phases can be retrieved. To recover quantifiable information regarding the sample, it is crucial to accurately perform semantic segmentation on the computed tomographs. Semantic segmentation refers to the categorization of each individual pixel within an image (voxel in 3D) into bins representing the various respective materials within the original data. Semantic segmentation poses relevance to a wide variety of computer vision and image analysis fields including autonomous driving, biomedical diagnosis, and agricultural analytics. Typical semantic segmentation often utilizes regional texture and color analysis or pixel distribution methods (Gaussian mixture and K-means) to determine pixel classification. These methods are highly reliable yet often are not time efficient on large datasets. Additionally, specific tuning is required for differing samples.
Keywords
Machine Learning; X-ray imaging; Material characterization
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Semester Project
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Published since: 2025-11-10 , Earliest start: 2026-01-12 , Latest end: 2026-05-29
Organization Group Supponen
Hosts Brewer Cameron
Topics Engineering and Technology
K-wave simulation of non-linear effects on HIFU transducer wave propagation
High intensity focused ultrasound is a non-invasive biomedical treatment for tissue ablation. Through the propagation of high intensity pressure waves, tissue material can be destroyed by thermal effects or cavitation damage in a pulsed signal. The approach is utilized in treatment of tumours in many parts of the body including breast, kidney, liver, and prostate. The high intensity of the incident wave leads to a non-constant speed of sound within the medium generating non-linearity effects on the wave. Wave non-linearity inherently shifts wave energy to higher harmonics, influencing bubble stability and cavitation threshold. A past student project has used K-wave (a Matlab package) to simulate the pressure field of an ultrasound transducer, focusing on signal reflection and distortion resulting from impeding objects within the propagation field. This project builds upon the previously completed work by incorporating non-linearity in the simulation focusing on high intensity burst waves and enables efficient transducer design by simulating the change in the pressure signal as the number of transducer elements and configuration are manipulated.
Keywords
Nonlinear acoustics; Numerical simulation; Code optimization
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Semester Project
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Published since: 2025-11-10 , Earliest start: 2026-01-12 , Latest end: 2026-05-29
Organization Group Supponen
Hosts Brewer Cameron
Topics Engineering and Technology
Shape oscillations of bubbles on an oscillating surface
When a microbubble resting on a surface is excited around its resonance frequency, the bubble exhibits intense shape deformations. This project aims at designing an experimental setup to capture the surface instabilities of accelerated bubbles.
Keywords
Fluid dynamics, bubbles, instability
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Semester Project , Bachelor Thesis , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2025-11-06 , Earliest start: 2026-01-01 , Latest end: 2026-06-30
Applications limited to Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering
Organization Group Supponen
Hosts Presse Louan
Topics Engineering and Technology
Microbubble characterization through acoustic radiation force
Acoustically driven microbubbles could unlock local drug delivery in a clinical setting. This therapy requires a precise characterization of the microbubble volumetric oscillations. This project will investigate an alternative method to characterize the volumetric oscillations indirectly through the acoustic radiation force. For this, the student is expected to conduct experiments and compare them with the predictions from theoretical models.
Keywords
Biomedical, drug delivery, ultrasound contrast agents, physics, experimental
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Semester Project , Master Thesis
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Published since: 2025-10-28 , Earliest start: 2025-12-01
Organization Group Supponen
Hosts Collado Gonzalo
Topics Engineering and Technology , Physics
Experimental Visualization of Phase Shift in Focused Ultrasound
Keywords
Ultrasound, Phase Shift, Ultrasound Transducers, Acoustics, Wave Physics
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Internship , Master Thesis , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2025-09-29 , Earliest start: 2025-09-30 , Latest end: 2026-09-30
Organization Group Supponen
Hosts Fiorini Samuele
Topics Mathematical Sciences , Engineering and Technology , Physics
Acoustic signatures associated with ADV – Influence of drop size and concentration
Acoustic droplet vaporization (ADV) is the phase-change process of superheated micron- and sub-micron-sized droplets into microbubbles under the application of high-frequency, high-amplitude ultrasound. Both optical and acoustic methods have been used to estimate the vaporization threshold, as during ADV the droplets grow multiple times their initial radius with the phase change emitting acoustic waves. However, very little research exists to correlate the optically observed dynamics with their respective acoustic signatures. To address these issues, this project aims to build upon previous work to combine optical and acoustic measurements and correlate the visualized ADV dynamics with the associated acoustic emissions. The goal is to measure the vaporization threshold for single droplet vaporization and study the variation with respect to the droplet size. The student will then proceed to work with multiple droplets to correlate the measured emission with different types of droplet populations and concentrations.
Keywords
Medical ultrasound, physics of fluids, acoustic, droplet vaporization, superheated, phase change
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Master Thesis
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Published since: 2025-09-23
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Group Supponen
Hosts Collado Gonzalo
Topics Engineering and Technology , Physics
Settling Modulation of Bi-Dispersed Heavy Particles in Turbulent Air
From rainfall in clouds to microplastic sinking in the ocean, particles of different sizes interact with turbulence in ways that deeply shape both natural and industrial processes. In the atmosphere, turbulence is thought to play a key role in warm rain formation by affecting how droplets move, collide and grow. A simpler yet important approach to studying these interactions is to investigate mixtures of two particle sizes with the same density. In this project, we will investigate the settling dynamics of bi-dispersed particles in air turbulence, focusing on how their settling velocity is affected by turbulence at higher particle densities. The students will track particles settling in the turbulence air chamber at ETH (see Figure below) using a 3D multi-camera system and reconstruct their trajectories with 3D tracking techniques. The acquired data will be used to understand better how turbulence affects the simultaneous settling behaviour of the two particle populations.
Keywords
Turbulence, Rain, Three-Dimensional Particle Tracking, Settling
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Semester Project , Bachelor Thesis , Master Thesis
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Published since: 2025-09-09 , Earliest start: 2025-09-15 , Latest end: 2025-12-15
Applications limited to EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , Eawag , Empa , ETH Zurich , Paul Scherrer Institute , University of Zurich , Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research
Organization Group Coletti
Hosts Coletti Filippo , Gambino Alessandro
Topics Engineering and Technology , Physics
Digital twin of fetal aortic hemodynamics (Collaboration - Aarhus University, Denmark)
Congenital heart defects (CHDs) affect a wide range of society around the globe with a prevalence of 1.0–1.2%. Hemodynamic forces such as the blood flow driven shear stresses are critical parameters that can influence the proper development of the endothelial and endocardial tissues. The hemodynamic development in the left heart is particularly important because the left heart provides the required pumping power for the blood circulation. In this extremely novel and pioneering project, we are employing MRI acquisitions of fetuses at different gestational ages for building digital twins of cardiovascular development. Such a model has the potential to revolutionize diagnostic procedures and provide invaluable tools for personalized medicine.
Keywords
Computational modelling; clinical imaging; hemodynamic modelling
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Semester Project , Master Thesis
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Published since: 2025-08-20 , Earliest start: 2025-09-01
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Group Coletti
Hosts Coletti Filippo , Li Yinghui
Topics Engineering and Technology
Surgical treatments of heart valve insufficiency: computational optimization through in-vitro and clinical data (Collaboration - Aarhus University, Denmark)
Innovative approaches are needed for understanding and treating complex cardiovascular diseases. In this context, the amalgamation of in-silico methods, flow-loop experiments and 4D imaging emerges as a transformative paradigm in cardiovascular research.
Keywords
Computational modelling; MRI 4D-flow validation; fluid dynamic flow-loop; biofluid dynamics
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Semester Project , Master Thesis
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Published since: 2025-08-20 , Earliest start: 2025-09-01
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Group Coletti
Hosts Coletti Filippo
Topics Engineering and Technology
Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) modelling of tri-leaflet valves in cardiovascular applications (Collaboration - Aarhus University, Denmark)
In-silico approaches such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analyses, offer a comprehensive platform for predicting disease progression and designing medical devices, reducing the reliance on costly and invasive experiments. In this translational project, we aim at developing complex numerical models of tri-leaflet aortic valves, and at validating them with clinical measurements provided by collaborators at AUH.
Keywords
Computational modelling; cardiovascular engineering; 4D magnetic resonance imaging
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Semester Project , Master Thesis
Description
Goal
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Published since: 2025-08-20 , Earliest start: 2025-09-01
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Group Coletti
Hosts Coletti Filippo
Topics Engineering and Technology