Projects
Chemical recycling of plastic waste: model-guided design and optimization of sorting and pyrolysis processes Ghent University
Plastic pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental issues. Chemical recycling of plastic waste into pyrolysis oils, followed by steam cracking into platform molecules, overcomes the limitations of current recycling processes and is expected to become one of the main routes to boost circularity. However, plastic waste contains large amounts of contaminants, a.o. halogens, heteroatoms (N, S, O, P), and metals. Steam crackers ...
Chemical Looping: Innovative Materials and Advanced Technologies (CLIMAT) Ghent University
Chemical looping processes are increasingly gaining interest in view of their potential role in the transition towards a carbon-circular economy. Compared to their conventional counterparts, chemical looping processes provide a means for process intensification through process step optimization and inherent product separation, thereby decreasing the need of downstream separation. A major challenge in chemical looping lies in the achievement ...
Chemical recycling of plastic waste to oil in supercritical water Ghent University
Chemical recycling of plastic waste to oil followed by subsequent steam cracking into light olefins will become the main route for reduction of the escalating plastic waste crisis in the coming decade. Plastic waste contains a significant amount of contaminants in the form of heteroatomic compounds containing O, N, S, Cl and Br. Steam crackers have strict limits on these contaminant concentrations to ensure a high quality product and protect ...
ASTRONOMY: ASTeROseismic iNput fOr cheMical Yield computations KU Leuven
The chemical enrichment of the Universe is caused by yields created by evolving stars. This ever changing astrochemistry is a critical ingredient for the understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies in the Universe. So far, chemical yield computations rely on stellar structure and evolution models that remained uncalibrated in terms of interior chemical mixing and interior rotation properties. Here, we take an entirely unique ...
Study of the chemical composition of exoplanets atmosphere. KU Leuven
In 1995, we discovered for the first time a planet orbiting around a star that was not the Sun. This planet was called an exoplanet. Since then, a lot of planets have been discovered, with various properties of mass, distance, host stars,… Among them, there are planets very close to their mother star, called hot Jupiters or hot Neptunes. These planets, because of their small orbital distance, receive a strong irradiation, so have a high ...
The impact of non-homogeneous AGB stellar winds on the chemical enrichment of their host galaxy KU Leuven
The majority of all material on Earth has been created by stars, the phrase that we are all stardust is indeed quite accurate. At the end of their lives, stars like our Sun will lose their outer envelopes by means of a so-called stellar wind. This material then goes on to form the birth site of a new generation of stars and planetary systems. Thanks to the advent of high resolution observatories, we can finally study the physics and chemistry ...
Chemical Information Mining in a Complex World Vrije Universiteit Brussel
A zebrafish platform for genetic and chemical screening to improve diagnosis, risk estimation and treatment of cardiovascular manifestations in Marfan syndrome. Ghent University
Marfan syndrome (MFS) is a rare disease caused by defects in the fibrillin-1 gene (FBN1), typically affecting many organ systems. The cardiovascular manifestations negatively impact life-expectancy, as MFS patients are particularly susceptible to progressive widening of the aorta that may lead to life-threatening tears in the vessel wall. Currently, there is no cure for MFS and clinical therapy is limited to reducing the risk of severe ...
Sabbatical Conny Aerts: Bridging Asteroseismology, Galactic Structure and Chemical Evolution KU Leuven
he aim is to perform the asteroseismological modeling of stars with masses above about 1.3 times the mass of the Sun and up to about 40 solar masses, which has so far been done based on high-precision time series collected with NASA Kepler (past) and TESS (operational) satellites, to improve with additional measurements. Asteroseismological modeling is a high-dimensional mathematical problem in computational astrophysics where spectroscopic ...