The number of students entering the chemical engineering Bachelor program of Technical University Eindhoven was 230 in September 2025. This is the highest number ever. Why are so many students now choosing this study? I do not know. What I do know however is that chemical engineers are integrators of knowledge from the fields of chemistry, physics, and mathematics, which enables them to generate new solutions.
Examples of these new solutions were presented at the Netherlands Process Technology Symposium NPS20, 3-4 November 2025, at Technical University Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Here are four of these solutions:
Professor Regina Paikovitz of RWTH Aachen University presented an electro-chemical design in which glycerol and alkaline in the electrolysis cell produce hydrogen at both electrodes with a voltage difference of 0.3 Volt. Potentially this means that the electrolyser cost per ton of hydrogen can be reduced by a factor of 4 or more.
Professor Valeria Garbin of TU Delft presented a new reactor based on a homogeneous catalyst inside emulsion droplets. Because of the small droplet size mass transfer rates are much higher than in other reactors, while catalyst separation from the product stream is not needed.
Student Jarno de Witte of Hanze Polytechnic, Groningen, showed experimentally that waste PET could be converted by well chosen chemical reactions into TWARON polymer. The TWARON polymer made was then spun into a 1500 meter long thread, which was as strong as TWARON made from native chemicals.
Student Lucas Poker of TU Delft showed by model calculations that the compressor in a High intensity heat integrated distillation column set (HiDIC), could be operated and controlled by a well designed control system, even if the feed to the distillation was turned down by 50 %,