Great success at the ChemPLANT competition

For the first time, a student team from the Department of Chemistry participated in the VDI's chemPLANT competition and immediately achieved second place. The “REWIND” team consisted of Master's students Arwed Cost, Florian Dubiel, Felix Möser, Lennard Niese and Hendrik Roth with a focus on technical chemistry. After submitting a short concept, the team was invited to the main round. They developed a comprehensive concept that finally had to be defended in poster pitches in front of a panel of experts at the PARTEC fair in Nuremberg. Among the top 3, the “REWIND” team was then given the opportunity to present and defend the concept in a presentation with audience voting, which was obviously a great success. The task in this year's competition was to develop a sustainable process for the efficient recycling of rotor blades from wind turbines. Our team impressed with a sophisticated concept based on solvolysis to recover part of the monomer BPA, glass fiber recyclate and gasification of the organic residues to synthesis gas for renewed chemical value creation. Overall, a convincing concept was presented and successfully defended. It demonstrates the possibility of efficiently recycling large-volume composite materials as part of a sustainable circular economy.