One of the customers of Selmers mentioned that they would like their pipe mill to be carbon neutral. What that entails you might ask? Honestly, your guess is as good as any… So, the Selmers team decided to start-off with the guesses from 16 TU Delft master students with various interesting backgrounds:

• Chemical Engineering
• Civil Engineering
• Complex Systems Engineering and Management
• Construction Management and Engineering
• Technology, Policy & Management

The students were prepared for a case study during a lunch lecture. Niels van der Plas and Marlou Claus hosted the lecture on 23 February in the Echo Building of the TUDelft. An inspiring venue for the topic since the building is carbon neutral and even yields energy! The building’s heating was set to 22 degrees Celsius, so with today’s energy prices we believed it for sure. The students got introduced to our company and industry and were submerged into its reality: that is not in line with all the theory they learned in school so far and an eye opener about challenges and opportunities to many.

On Friday 3 March Niels van der Plas and Madhusudan Desai introduced the students to a draft pipe mill design and supported them while they were working in groups, dedicated to a topic: utility, water, heat, transport or ‘free’. At the end of their day at Selmers the groups presented their best ideas to the jury (Rob Schouten, Andrey Suris, Ramon Keizer and Natasja Sesink).

The jury and Selmers colleagues present were blown away by the creativity of the ideas and solutions presented. The ideas were very diverse, including the use of magnets to eliminate engines and the use of hydrogen which can be generated using existing processes. Selmers will further develop this technological development in their process lines in order to further reduce CO2 emissions.

The team with the best ideas won the Selmers Sustainability Award, presented by none other than our own MeeMaken Koala Ko! We will now further review the ideas and asses which ones are good enough to suggest to our customer. And who knows, it might just lead to technological improvements that would directly get implemented in the near future.

The students all took home a Selmers hoodie and rubix cube, to show their fellow students how awesome Selmers is.. and maybe one of them someday will become our colleague!

Take a look at the pictures of the event here.