Design processes require the joint effort of many people to collaborate and work on multiple activities. Effective techniques to analyse and model design processes are important for understanding organisational dynamics, for improving collaboration, and for planning robust design processes, reducing the risk of rework and delays. Although there has been much progress in modelling and understanding design processes, little is known about the interplay between people and the activities they perform and its influence on design process robustness. To analyse this interplay, we model a large-scale design process of a biomass power plant with $100+$ people and ${\sim}150$ activities as a bipartite network. Observing that some people act as bridges between activities organised to form nearly independent modules, in order to evaluate process fragility, we simulate random failures and targeted attacks to people and activities. We find that our process is more vulnerable to attacks to people rather than activities. These findings show how the allocation of people to activities can obscure an inherent fragility, making the process highly sensitive and dependent on specific people. More generally, we show that the behaviour of robustness is determined by the degree distributions, the heterogeneity of which can be leveraged to improve robustness and resilience to cascading failures. Overall, we show that it is important to carefully plan the assignment of people to activities.

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Electrochemical methods such as voltammetry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy are effective for quantifying solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) operational performance, but not for identifying and monitoring the chemical processes that occur on the electrodes' surface, which are thought to be strictly related to the SOFCs' efficiency. Because of their high operating temperature, mechanical failure or cathode delamination is a common shortcoming of SOFCs that severely affects their reliability. Infrared thermography may provide a powerful tool for probing in situ SOFC electrode processes and the materials' structural integrity, but, due to the typical design of pellet-type cells, a complete optical access to the electrode surface is usually prevented. In this paper, a specially designed SOFC is introduced, which allows temperature distribution to be measured over all the cathode area while still preserving the electrochemical performance of the device. Infrared images recorded under different working conditions are then processed by means of a dedicated image processing algorithm for quantitative data analysis. Results reported in the paper highlight the effectiveness of infrared thermal imaging in detecting the onset of cell failure during normal operation and in monitoring cathode activity when the cell is fed with different types of fuels.