Sander van den Broek

Sander van den Broek works where structural analysis, uncertainty and machine learning meet. He founded Van den Broek Computational Mechanics to offer this expertise to engineering teams and AI developers.

He studied mechanical engineering at Delft University of Technology, with an MSc thesis on aeroelastic analysis of wind turbines. His doctorate at the Institute of Structural Analysis, Leibniz Universität Hannover, supervised by Prof. Raimund Rolfes, turned the random variations that normally weaken structures into a design tool. Sensitivity patterns from random-field analyses guide changes in thickness, stiffness or fibre paths that raise buckling loads, improve post-buckling behaviour and extend fatigue life. The research was funded by the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie network FULLCOMP and the DFG Cluster of Excellence SE²A.

At the Bristol Composites Institute, University of Bristol, he developed higher-order finite elements for wind turbine blades (with the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult) and Gaussian-process surrogates for landing-gear design loads (with Airbus). He is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at Bristol and an R&D engineer in computational mechanics of structures at the Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR).

He also creates engineering-mechanics data for training and evaluating language models, and wrote abq2ccx, an open-source Abaqus-to-CalculiX converter.