Chemical Reaction Engineer

Who we are:

DUDE CHEM is a Green Chemistry startup with its origins in the German Cluster of Excellence in Catalysis at the University of Technology Berlin. We are a small but mighty team which is dedicated to fulfilling our mission:
Based on the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry we aim to build a green chemical-pharmaceutical industry. The industry currently consumes >13% of all fossil resources, most of them during the manufacturing. Our aim is to change this.

In order to achieve this goal, we have built a strong IP portfolio and validated the tech onto the market in order to reduce or reuse expensive resources in the production of chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

We believe that digitalization can be an integral tool for the implementation of greener, more sustainable production processes.

This is why we combine both scientific disciplines – digitalization and sustainability – in all of our projects. Over the last years, our team has proven that our approaches work and created hard competitive advantages in the core of the value chain of their customers.

Why we need you:

We are expanding our development team in order to bring our first, greener manufactured products into the plants. Further, many customers are approaching us in order to get our support and help them to produce in a more sustainable and controlled way. Thus, we need your help to bring our greener processes into manufacturing as part of our Chemistry & Engineering Team.

In this role you will support our development team with your chemical and reaction engineering know-how as well as your modelling & optimization expertise. You will be responsible for developing and implementing complex mechanistic reaction models for our greener processes and use these models to up-scale the processes and run them in the optimal way.

If you want to bring innovative green chemical manufacturing processes from the lab scale into the plant scale and have a real positive impact on the world, you are the perfect match for us!

Tasks you will be working on:

• Further develop the reactions of our greener processes in collaboration with our chemists.
• Work together with our chemists to determine the detailed reaction networks, and pathways of the reactions.
• Build up and dimensionally scale down the experimental equipment needed for conducting kinetic studies.
• Design, plan, set up, execute and evaluate experimental kinetic studies of different reactions in order to provide safe, efficient, robust and scalable processes.
• Determine the reaction kinetics and use them to model the chemical reaction and reactor.
• Predict and determine experimentally needed physical and chemical properties.
• Coordinate the experimental work with our chemists and lab technicians.
• Perform parameter estimation based on experimental data and validate the developed models.
• Use the developed models for the scale up of the processes from lab scale to plant scale.
• Define optimization problems, implement them and use the developed models to find the optimal operating conditions for the plant scale.

Skills and attitudes that might be helpful:

• Degree (M.Sc., Dipl.
  
  -Ing or PhD) in chemical engineering, or a related engineering discipline.
• Knowledge in reaction engineering, especially reaction kinetics, reactor design, multi-phase reaction systems and thermodynamics.
• Experience in working in interdisciplinary teams, leading discussions with chemists and pushing for the joint solution on complex problems.
• Experience in planning, execution and evaluation of reaction kinetic experiments in the lab or kilo lab.
• Experience in scaling up reactions from the lab to the plant scale using state of the art modeling approaches.
• Experience in computational solving of complex Differential-Algebraic-Equation (DAE) Systems using sophisticated model parameter estimation approaches.
• Experience in Python or a similar programming language like MATLAB.
• Experience using modeling and simulation tools such as Aspen Plus, gProms, Dyno Chem, or IDAES.
• Experience with optimization tools such as Pyomo, GAMS or AMPL.
• Good organizational and project as well as time management skills.
• Highly self-driven, professional personality with…