A Walk in Copenhagen

If I could pick a single word to describe Copenhagen (København in Danish), I would say "regal." It is a beautiful and proud city, with Danish flags flying everywhere, more statues than I could count, and very clean and proud architectural design.

On the day of my arrival in Denmark, I ventured with a fellow classmate from Lyngby (the site of DTU) to Copenhagen to have a look around. We had little time, so this first trip primarily involved walking the Strøget, a famous street that is supposedly the longest pedestrian shopping area in Europe. Below is a picture from a square at its end, Kongens Nytorv.


There was an exhibit on the Strøget that caught my attention (and Laura's too when she arrived for the weekend) entitled Signspotting, which featured reproductions of the world's weirdest signage. This included signs with double entendres, irony, and tons of poor translations. Some of our pictures are below, but you can see many more at Signspotting.com.





With rain clouds bearing down on the city, I ended my walk with a free tour at the Danish Resistance Museum, which was really excellent. The tour detailed the Danish government's official "collaboration" (as it was called) with the Germans, which was a means of protecting the people; they essentially provided just enough support to the Germans to remain mostly autonomous during German occupation. Slowly, of course, things deteriorated, martial law was enacted, and a significant resistance movement was born, mostly involving sabotage of railways, ships, and other infrastructure important to the occupying forces.

There's a saying that Denmark is like The Netherlands ... but with two more months of winter. The similarities are there for sure: bikes are used as a primary mode of transportation, there's a similar international flavor to the country, infrastructure is similar, etc. Based on the weekend weather in June - high 50's to low 60's with buckets of rain - I think the second part of the statement is accurate as well.

Beyond Lisbon...Denmark!

While I was attending the engineering conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Laura did most of the sightseeing. She'll be writing about that as soon as she gets everything settled in Gainesville.

In the meantime, I'm going to skip ahead another week. After returning from Lisbon, I was back in Delft for a day before heading on Tuesday, June 9th to Denmark Technical University (DTU) in the greater Copenhagen area for a graduate course. The course stretched over the weekend, at which time Laura joined me for some sightseeing in Copenhagen.

But before showing our pictures from the wonderful city of Copenhagen, the topic of the course I took - topology optimization - is sufficiently cool and accessible that I'm going to tell you what it is.

In the design of structures, a common goal is to produce a structure that will carry a given load without material failure or excessive deflection. You might have some kind of design domain (the light blue/purple area below) and know where you want to connect the structure to something else (the green triangles) and where the load will be (the red arrow). A solid block (like the light blue/purple) might suffice, but that's heavy and wasteful. So the question a designer needs to answer is, "Where should the holes go?"



Well, the TopOpt group at DTU, to put it simply, is the world's leading authority on how to use computer algorithms to figure out where the holes should go. In the animation below, you can actually see the algorithm progressively remove material until the final best (or optimal) part is produced! If you missed the animation, click on the image and you can watch it again. (If you're using Firefox, you may then need to hold 'Shift' while clicking the 'Refresh' button.)



The TopOpt Group at DTU offers some very nice web tools (which I used to produce the pictures above), so you can try it for yourself. It was a real pleasure to learn about this topic from all of the very nice people at DTU!