Master's students

MASTER PROJECTS

Students with a background in chemistry or physics are encouraged to explore the possibilities of doing a Bachelor or Master research project at the Van 't Hoff Laboratory.

Below you can find brief descriptions of example Master research projects that could be completed in our group. Bachelor projects can be found on the Bachelor projects page.

If you are interested in a project or topic, please contact the student coordinator, Geert Schulpen, for more information.

 

  • Counterion Condensation on Polyelectrolytes

    Polyelectrolytes are polymers with electrically charged chemical groups that strongly impact the physical properties. A key property of polyelectrolytes is their electric charge, but this is not easily determined. In this project, different experimental techniques (conductivity, titration, osmometry, …) will be used to measure the electric charge of polyelectrolytes, as a function of polyelectrolyte concentration and ionic strength.

    Sam Bastiaan
    FCC PhD

  • Fabricating bicontinuous interfacially jammed emulsion gels (bijels) with battery/silicon dioxide core-shell particles

    Next-generation Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries feature faster charging rates, longer operation lifespan, and sustainable materials. Improving Li-ion battery performance provides powerful energy storage solutions, essential for expanding electric vehicle use and building more flexible electrical grids. However, the application of battery nanoparticles with high theoretical capacity and natural abundance is hindered by diffusion limitation of Li-ions and significant volumetric change during charge-discharge cycles. However, one major obstacle is the huge volume expansion of battery nanoparticles while charging.

    Wei-Che Lin
    FCC PhD

  • Information Encoding with Droplet Polymers

    Nature ingeniously encodes information through the sequence of base pairs in DNA, guiding the assembly of proteins. In contrast, synthetic copolymers lack such control, as co-monomers are distributed randomly along the chain. To overcome this limitation, recent research with emulsions has introduced droplet polymers with programmable sequences for microscopic information encoding. However, the underlying chemistry is often complex and difficult to scale, restricting practical applications. The goal of this MSc project is to explore a simple yet powerful approach to obtain droplet polymers with encoded information.

    Martin Haase
    Martin Haase
    FCC