20  Modification to the original thesis and source code

The author’s goal was to leave the content of the master thesis as it was when it was submitted to the TU-Braunschweig. It is known by the author of this thesis that some mistakes in the figures text and other smaller mistakes as well do exist. However, the main aim of this website view is to show what was achieved for the master thesis. Not to improve the master thesis by correcting mistakes and adding new knowledge to it. It is not desired to fix the mentioned errors to make sure that the skills that the author had at the time of writing his master thesis are presented as true as possible.

Also, it is more than fine including these mistakes, since it shows the nature of the human being behind the work, which is appreciated by the author. Besides the content of written thesis, making use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript offers some capabilities to make the reading experience interesting and maybe almost entertaining. Having said so, the main difference between the written master thesis PDF and this online website edition is that, the website is interactive.

  1. It contains animations,
  2. beautiful dark mode,
  3. light mode,
  4. the tornado is shown in the cover page as a 3d interactive plot
  5. the citations are shown in full without having to look at the reference page, hovering over a reference is enough
Download original PDF

Feel free to download the original PDF from chapter 21.

20.1 Modifications that have been made to the original master thesis

Initially, the author wanted to give a detailed listing of the changes which were made for the website. It is believed to be not necessary, however, the following list could be obtained until the change of mind:

  1. The images for the PDF were embedded as PDF files. For this web view, the images were all converted from PDF to SVG using Inkscape. Note that at the beginning of writing the master thesis all figures were generated as .svg, PNGs and PDFs via an automated process. However, too many images were stored, thus only SVGs and PNGs were kept at some point. The conversion from PDF to SVG might include quality loss. Instead of the conversion, it would be possible to generate all the images directly as SVG again. Considering the high number of used figures, the conversion from PDF to SVG is much faster. For the latter, all the differential equations must have been solved again. So in a nutshell, SVGs are used instead of PDFs, though a conversation process, which might involve some quality losses.

  2. the order of references and appendix

  3. the two appendices in the web view have their own separate pages

  4. The first 3 set of equations and figures in section 13 are displayed in full width instead of theequations and corresponding figures being next to each other in a two column representation

  5. the original master thesis PDF was written in Latex (see chapter 21)

  6. The section you are reading right now, is not found in the PDF file, due to obvious reasons

20.2 Source code

For this section, the author of this work would like to switch from the passive voice used in scientific writing to the active voice used for an engaging and friendly tone. I initially intended to release the entire code on GitHub, so that everyone could play with it. This was also one of the reasons why I invested in code readability during coding. However, the code is not my property, as it was written for the TU Braunschweig. Dr. Richard Semaan advised me to wait with publishing the source code until he and his team have made more progress towards a publication. My experience with Dr. Semaan is that he’s a nice guy, and he usually replies within half an hour. So maybe he would be willing to share the source code with people who ask him for it. You can contact him through the contact information provided at the TU Braunschweig website.

It might be well-known that some people and universities tend to say that the written thesis is what counts. Since I have another opinion on that, I would like to apologize - I totally understand that such a thesis is much more valuable and enjoyable with the source code. In fact, I would argue that the code is the most important part of my thesis.