Effect of blending on thermal behaviour of polymers

Company Information

Veridis wants to create a better future for humanity and the planet. Our mission is to deliver key recycling technologies to advance the transition to a circular economy. We are trying to create a place of work where scientists and engineers can develop technical opportunities to benefit society and the climate. To achieve these objectives, we offer a challenging internship with flexible working hours, an informal atmosphere, and a lot of independence and responsibility.

Veridis is a deep-tech startup developing a new system to improve quality control in plastic recycling: MAssive DSC ANalysis (MADSCAN). This technology is a new thermal analysis method that recyclers can use to analyse plastics/polymers to give the material characteristics (type, degradation, etc.). With our MADSCAN technology, we scale up the sample size of a thermal analysis by a factor of 100.000, which allows us to give a representative analysis of large batches of plastics, thereby increasing the relevance to the recycling industry. With this method, we can analyse dark plastics, detect material degradation, and, most importantly, directly improve recycled plastics’ commercial value.

Assignment Description

Within this internship you will be researching the effect of polymer mixing on their physical properties and in specific, their thermal properties. The focus will be a literature review on these effects, focussing on a small subset of polymers. This will require combining the information of different measurement methods and datasets. If everything goes well, the found conclusions can be compared to MADSCAN measurements of (recycled) polymer samples. Even proposing and performing tests might be applicable in order to verify the assumptions or conclusions made. All this can also lead to a possible publication.

This internship assignment will allow you to impact the improvement of plastic recycling and, therefore, the circular transition as a whole. Because of the multidisciplinary start-up environment, you will learn a lot from different disciplines. And most importantly, you will develop your research skills a lot by working independently on a challenging project with the rest of the team to give unique insights to help you. Finally, if the internship works out well, we are always interested in considering extending your stay with us or even taking you on board as an employee.

Intern Profile

You are a creative and curious person who is not afraid of a challenge and working with complex literature that seems overwhelming at first. You like taking initiative and contributing new ideas or research directions. You have high standards with the ability to dive deep, critically evaluate the work of yourself and others, and relate the research you are performing to the MADSCAN system output. You can condense state-of-the-art papers at an academic level and extract relevant conclusions from those.

Requirements:

• Currently enrolled in or having acquired a MSc student in (Applied) Physics, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, or anything related to those.

Preferences (not requirements):

• Basic knowledge of polymer science
• Experience with thermal analysis methods

Contact Details

Floris Gerritsen – fjagerritsen@veridis.tech
https://veridis.tech/
Address: De Boelelaan 1081 – VU WN-Building O236