Aza Alawi
Background
I obtained the Bachelor Molecular Science and Technology and Master Chemical Engineering at TU Delft. Throughout my studies I became interested in transport phenomena and how a process can be made more sustainable through it's improvement. During my Master thesis I worked on the prediction of the performance of Pickering emulsion reactors in the Transport Phenomena group. After an industrial internship at Umincorp on optimization of the plastic sorting machines, I came back in the group to pursue a PhD on electrical drying of biomass.
Research
The conventional dewatering method of biomass at industrial scale is evaporative drying. This drying method represents 15-25% of industrial energy consumption. Besides this, product quality is not preserved well and many new bio-based resources will only become viable if more efficient dewatering technologies become available. A promising technology is electrohydrodynamic drying, which has been reported to be a superior method in terms of energy consumption and quality preservation. In order to scale up this method, fundamental understanding of the drying process is required. The aim of my PhD project is to elucidate the water removal mechanisms combining microscale experiments and numerical simulations.
