Position Code: BERENG02
Company Introduction:
This is a company passionate about climate & sustainability. You will be working at a young start-up that aims to tackle one of humanity’s biggest challenges: reversing global warming.
This company reverses climate change by dramatically cutting costs of Direct Air Capture leveraging cooling towers around Europe.
According to the IPCC, the UN expert panel on climate change, we will have to remove over 10 billion tons of COâ‚‚ from the atmosphere annually. This is due to the fact that some industries will not be able to cut their emissions completely, for example, agriculture and aviation.
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Capturing COâ‚‚ directly from the air – is the only technology that enables this to be achieved on an industrial scale. However, today, Direct Air Capture systems are too expensive and time-consuming to build, preventing humanity from reaching this goal on time.
By retrofitting existing infrastructure without impacting its original function, the time and cost needed to set up a carbon-capturing system are improved by up to 10x. Indeed, millions of existing cooling towers around Europe continuously circulate massive amounts of air to remove heat from industrial plants and buildings. By efficiently retrofitting those towers, they remove the carbon dioxide from all this air at a very low additional cost. Several billion tons of CO₂ could be captured this way annually, a huge share of humanity’s long-term needs.
Role: Chemical Engineering Intern
Internship Description:
As a Chemical Engineering Intern or Thesis Student, you will be part of the product team, working closely with the Head of R&D and the CTO. Here you will gain deeper insights into a highly relevant field of the future. In practice, you will help develop and validate our carbon capture processes through laboratory experiments and literature research:
- Research methods for attaching polymeric sorbents to advanced 3D support structures
- Do in-depth literature research to identify new opportunities and improve our chemical processes
- Develop and run experiments for the characterization of various sorbent materials
- Help build and test prototypes of early product versions
Requirements:
- Student in Chemical Engineering or Chemistry (or related disciplines)
- General knowledge of various polymers, their functional groups, and their effects on material properties
- Understanding of phenomena relevant to chemical engineering and physical chemistry such as vapour-liquid equilibrium and heat and mass transfer
- Interest in installing lab equipment and performing experiments
- Availability for 3-6 months
- Passionate about climate and sustainability
- Interest in performing an internship or writing a final thesis