Projects and Theses

Here I will be collecting information on various projects as well as my theses.

Master's thesis in Applied Mathematics

Spring 2026 I wrote my master's thesis Cut Finite Element Approximation of the Mean Curvature Vector. Below here you can find the almost finalized draft, and links to the code used for the numerical experiments.

Master's thesis in Solid Mechanics

During the spring of 2025 I wrote my master's thesis on constitutive modelling of expanded polystyrene (EPS) foams for energy-absorbing applications, in collaboration with Mips AB. I developed a framework for physically reasonable predictions that discovers what is essentially a hyperplastic model from data–-capturing elastic and inelastic behaviour while respecting key mechanical principles. Trained on synthetic and foam-like datasets, it reproduces uniaxial response and improves biaxial predictions, and indicates clear directions for further work.

TekMek Machine Learning Retreat 2025

Over the summer of 2025 I co-developed interactive Jupyter notebook material for the TekMek Machine Learning Retreat, a faculty-oriented course at the KTH Department of Engineering Mechanics on machine learning and data-driven methods in engineering mechanics. The published notebooks introduce practical scientific Python workflows for regression, classification, PCA, neural networks, recurrent models, and sparse identification of dynamical systems. Additional prepared material covered convolutional neural networks and autoencoders.

Bachelor's thesis

During the spring of 2023 I completed my bachelors thesis in materials and process design. My primary concern when choosing project was to be able to do something related to simulations and numerical analysis. This resulted in a project where I simulated heat tranfer in the walls of a ladle during pre-heating in collaboration with Ovako in Hofors. Based on tetragonal unstructured meshes generated using the open source programme Gmsh I wrote code in Julia that was able to solve the heat equation subject to a variety of boundary conditions using a finite volume methodology. Below are links for those interested in more details.

Gustaf Bjurstam. Last modified: June 04, 2026. Website built with Franklin.jl and the Julia programming language.