ACKNOWLEDGMENT This report concludes my master thesis project conducted at Marel Poultry Processing representing the end of my master studies at Eindhoven University of Technology and completes one more stage in my life as a student. I would first like to thank dr Tarkan Tan, my first supervisor from the university, I appreciate your time flexibility and your effective feedback to guide me in the right direction whenever I ran into a trouble spot or I had a question about my research. I value that you consistently allowed this research to be my own, and your guidance constantly encouraged me to take a further step to improve my project. Then, my second supervisor from the university, dr Rob Basten, thank you for your great support especially during the first stages of this project. I appreciate your valuable comments to improve the applicability of my research and your suggestions to improve my writing and report. Also, thanks for putting me in contact with Marel. Next, my supervisor from Marel, Robert Lemmens. Thank you for the opportunity of conducting this thesis at Marel. I appreciate your close involvement in this project and your practical feedback to improve my thesis. I am also grateful for your very valuable comments about my report. Furthermore, my gratitude goes to the rest of the Structural Group Service Department, thank you all for the nice work environment provided during the six months that this thesis lasted. Also from Marel, I would like to thank Dirk Kuijpers and Peter van Vegchel. I appreciate your support in providing me the information needed to conduct this thesis. I must express my very profound gratitude to my parents, my brother, my aunts, and grandma for your unfailing support all the way from Ecuador. I really appreciate our long-distance calls and the unceasing encouragement during these two years. This achievement would not have been possible without you. Thank you. I take this opportunity to also thank my friends for their amazing support not only during the last six months but during the past two years. My days in Eindhoven were undoubted better because I met all of you. I appreciate your patience in listening to me for the last months talking about the same thing repeatedly, but I am convinced that those chats helped me to clear my thoughts to continue with my project. So, Nadia, Patty, Andrés, Axel, Daniel, and Santiago, thanks for being there and for all the fun moments outside the university. Finally, this thesis and in general my master studies would have been impossible without the grant offered by the Government of the Republic of Ecuador through the National Secretary of Higher Education, Science, Technology, and Innovation and its program “Top Universities 2015”. Also, I would like to acknowledge the “Programa Walter Valdano Raffo” from Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral.
Jenny Gutierrez
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