Brendon de Raad wins Blue Sky Pro Young Professional Award

Brendon de Raad was announced the winner of the Blue Sky Pro Young Professionals Award. According to the jury his project 'Towards a Sustainable Dutch Paper Industry: The Application of Heat Pumps' is a shining example of forward-thinking and sustainable industry practices. His work is about the deployment of heat pumps in a transitioning industrial sector.

Industrial heat pumps are a game changing technology that will allow to at least halve energy consumption of low temperature processes (<300C), while electrifying the remaining demand. ‘This will allow the Dutch paper industry to directly meet its 2030 goals and beyond!’, says De Raad, PhD candidate at TPM and researcher at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. The huge potential of this technology is increasingly being recognized, but the uptake in industry is slow. This is mainly due to the difficulty of finding techno-economically attractive heat pump solutions, as an engineer has to have an understanding of both the production process and the workings of a heat pump. Therefore De Raad, together with other researchers, has developed a tool that helps people in industry to better understand how their operation effects the technical performance of a heat pump and its business case.

About the Blue Sky Young Professional award

The Blue Sky Young Professional award is a distinguishment of remarkable achievement in research and development in advanced forest science, innovative products using forest-based materials, and enhancements in the pulp and paper production industry.