The refreshment of manual labour is often overlooked, I feel. With varying intensity I aided in renovating various appartments and residences. Together with my parents and brother we form a strong team where everyone has their task.
Since 2016 I have been busy teaching mathematics to industrious high school students. In this initiative of the foundation "Wiskunde D online" students of smaller high schools can participate in the most challenging and hardest version of maths given in Dutch high schools. It is my responsibility to convey these topics and correct their work.
In 2017 I took the role of coordinator in this organisation. In the newborn foundation there were some improvements to be made, both financially and organizationally. .
Since 2017 I constructively assisted professors with various courses in the Chemical Engineering Bachelor programme. In this period I had the responsibility of conveying my skills in process simulation and modelling to the students in the courses: General Process Equipment, Special Process Equipment, Process Design and in the Bachelor Thesis Chemical Engineering.
Furthermore, in cooperation with another MSc. student CE we developed a video series in which BSc students are taught the basics of process modeling in Aspen Plus. This initiative facilitated the large group of students we had to cover together.
After this we were given the responsibility of giving lectures on process modelling instead of tutoring the students, which felt like an honour. .
Since 2017 I was given the opportunity to give the web classes for the Bachelor Chemistry. Three times per year high school students are able to attend this 4 week web class and they are given the chance to experience the level of the first year of the bachelor Chemistry/Chemical Engineering. The topics of the web classes were the Nobel Prize winning work of Professor Ben Feringa and the working mechanisms of various types of photovoltaics. .
Various other small projects and low intensity jobs were performed with and for Science Linx. These include helping high school students with their theses and being the student assistant for mathematics at the RUG.
In this project for BIOMCN, a company located in Farmsum, NL, I undertook the challenge to determine the catalytic stability of alternative steam reforming catalysts. The company encountered pressure drop problems in their reactor while co-feeding glycerol with methane in their steam reforming process.
In my research I first established the mechanism for the reactor choking and determined the stability of the alternative catalysts over 100h of reaction in a self-developed pre-pilot plant setup.
With knowledge of the mechanism, improved solutions can be conjured in terms of catalyst development and processing for this particular process.
In my bachelor's thesis I looked into the implementation of electrolysis and cryogenic air separation in industrial ammonia plants. This vast file (330 pages/75000 words) contained a part of the information necessary to convert an actual plant. Therein was a sizeable model in Aspen plus V8, showing a steady state stream summary for the entire plant. The conclusion was a promising one, indicating that a small overcapacity could be archieved for conventional plants.
I had embarked on a 6 month research project in polymeric surfactants for prof Picchioni's group, commisioned by Royal Cosun. In this project I extensively used GPC, NMR and optical techniques in order to obtain key information about the copolymers I had synthesized. The main focus of the project was acquiring a copolymer that lowered interfacial tension in emulsion while maintaining a polymer solution's characteristic rheological properties. These properties are useful in EOR.