The Master’s track in Engineering Solid Mechanics is part of the Mechanical Engineering Master’s Program. This means that you apply for the Master’s Program in Mechanical Engineering (CROHO: 60439) and specialize in ESM. This master’s track offers a two-year program (120 ECTS) during which the first year is all about courses and the second year is dedicated to the internship (15 ECTS) and graduation project (45 ECTS). After completing the program, you are awarded the Master’s diploma in Mechanical Engineering stating your specialization in Engineering Solid Mechanics.
Year 1 | Core program | 20 ECTS |
| Specialization courses | 20 ECTS |
| Free electives | 15 ECTS |
| Professional skills courses | 5 ECTS |
Year 2 | Internship | 15 ECTS |
| Graduation Project | 45 ECTS |
Year 1
The first-year core program and specialization courses offer a solid foundation of continuum mechanics, mathematics, numerical methods, materials aspects, and experimental methods – with room to focus on your special-interest topics.
You choose at least four core courses (20 ECTS) from the list below:
- Advanced Engineering Mathematics
- Advanced Computational Continuum Mechanics
- Experimentation for Mechanical Engineering
- Scientific Computing for Mechanical Engineering
- Engineering Optimization
- Fracture Mechanics – Theory and Application
In addition, you choose at least four specialization courses (20 ECTS) from the list below:
- Composite and Light-weight Materials
- Structural performance of polymers and polymer composites
- Multiscale Modeling for Polymer Mechanics
- Computational and Experimental Micro-mechanics
- Advanced Discretization Techniques
- Advanced and Additive Manufacturing
You are welcome to customize your course program in the 15 ECTS of free electives. We offer suggestions to expand your capabilities in design, mathematics. or dynamics. Should you plan to set up your own company, TU/e offers excellent courses on entrepreneurship. Physics and chemistry courses can be selected by students who would like to dig deeper into the fundamental properties of matter. There are a lot of possibilities – including an exchange with our partner universities in the Netherlands and throughout Europe. As part of the first-year course program, you also follow professional skills courses (5 ECTS), focused on career development, teamwork, academic writing and more.
Year 2
The second year is comprised solely of project work. The main purpose of the internship project is to become part of a professional environment other than TU/e for a few months. You are typically taken on at an organization in the Netherlands or a partner university or company abroad. The graduation project is the highlight of your education. It generally consists of a research or design project at TU/e. In some cases, you may also work on your graduation project at one of our partner companies or research labs. This is where you show you have become an independent engineering professional worthy of your master’s degree. You choose your own subject in consultation with your mentor. Topics can be very diverse – see below for examples. Our only requirement is that the project has a significant solid mechanics component and related challenge.
Examples of graduation project subjects
The diversity of subjects covered in graduation projects, and in the master’s track as a whole, is illustrated by the following list of titles of recently completed projects:
- Optimizing warpage predictions of long-glass fiber reinforced thermoplastics
- Design, processing, and analysis of acoustic metafoams
- The development of a table-size high-temperature selective laser sintering 3D printer
- Finite-element analysis of a functional tilt mechanism on the design of a new medical linear accelerator
- Die shape optimization for extrudate products
- Characterization and modeling of the influence of moisture on the mechanical behavior of SLS printed food
- Towards the production of multilayer HDPE/CNT-HDPE films and evaluation of their electromagnetic properties
- Physics-driven machine learning for real-time simulations of medical devices
- Predictability of fatigue failure of short fiber reinforced plastics
- Understanding the fracture behavior of pressureless silver sintered joints designed for power packaging
A complete overview and details of graduation projects are given here and here.
The Mechanical Engineering pre-Master’s program
Students of the following tw categories may be required to complete the Mechanical Engineering (ME) pre-Master’s program before being admitted to the Engineering Solid Mechanics Master’s track:
- Bachelor graduates from TU/e programs (or other Dutch universities) who did not obtain a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering or equivalent
- Graduates from University of Applied Sciences (HBO) mechanical engineering programs or equivalent
The ME pre-Master’s typically takes one semester and is worth 30 ECTS. You acquire the necessary background to enable a seamless and successful transition into the ESM Master’s track. We strongly recommend taking the course Strength and Structure as an elective. For further information please visit the Education Guide*.
*Note: students use the Education Guide as a source of information. It contains detailed, practical information that is important during your study program. Prospective students can consult the Education Guide for additional information.