A large proportion of the historic oil paintings in museums are confronted with degradation issues. Chemical reactions between the paint and the oil creates bulging and flaking while the humidity and the temperature in museums cause cracks. The Italian researcher Emanuela Bosco (31, Built Environment) will be developing a multi-physical model to predict these harmful phenomena and thus produce guidelines for conservation.

Catalysts are crucial for a sustainable future. They are vital for a clean, chemical industry and the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable alternatives like biomass. Insight into catalytic processes is thereby essential. Ivo Filot (32, Chemical Engineering) will be studying these processes at ‘mesoscale’, a scale of length that lies between the atomic level (nanoscale) and the level of whole reactors (macroscale). See the short film about his research.

For sustainable energy production cheap and large-scale energy storage is key; wind and sun are not available at every moment of the day. A new type of battery, a so-called flow battery, is regarded as a very promising candidate for this, but it is still in its infancy in terms of development. Koen Hendriks (31, Chemical Engineering / DIFFER) will be working on a new class of organic molecules that can be charged both positive and negative, and form the basis of a flow battery.

More than 30 million people in Europe suffer from a rare disease. This concerns over 7000 different rare diseases but treatment is only available for 300 of these. So it takes a long time, for example, for specific drugs to reach the market since the alignment between the pharmaceutical companies and the policymakers is inadequate. Turkish researcher Tugce Martagan (31, Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences) will develop models that optimize the production process and should help to create rules and strategies that enable safe and good drugs to get to market faster and at lower cost.

French researcher Ghislaine Vantomme (31, Institute for Complex Molecular Systems) will build on the world first recently presented by TU/e researchers in Nature. She wants to take the next step in polymers that react to light with an uncontrolled movement and work towards self-sufficient materials with surfaces that vibrate in a controlled way to a constant beam of light. These surfaces can be used for self-cleaning and the transport of liquids through membranes or pipelines.

Many everyday materials, such as paint formulations and foodstuffs, are macromolecular mixtures. These macromolecules macromolecules often show no willingness to join together in one mixture, thereby forming two separate phases. Examples include pigment and binding particles in paint or polysaccharides and proteins in foodstuffs. Usually this phase separation is unwanted, but Vis (29, Chemical Engineering) will use new, experimental techniques to understand this interface and try to be able to stabilize it. If he succeeds, it will pave the way for new materials, like fat-free mayonaise or new types of paint.

The silicon solar cells we see around us have a yield of around 20 percent. It is important that this yield is increased for the transition to a sustainable energy supply. Scientific research refers to yields of more than 25 percent but such solar cells are not yet up to industrial scale production. In this project Jimmy Melskens (34, Applied Physics) wants to develop methods that can make this happen. So he is going to use highly transparent metal oxides as contacts in order to reduce the electrical and optical losses in the solar cell.

Source: Press team TU/e