- Education , Student
- 26/08/2020
Mulling over obsidian
Twenty challenging cases lay spread out across the campus today, awaiting more than nine hundred participants in this year's Master's Kick-off. In the TU/e innovation Space, novice master's students racked their brains on a range of topics, including possible applications for obsidian.
This challenge has been contributed by Team CORE - and with pleasure, as is evident from spokesperson Dirk van Meer. His team collected plenty of input last year during the Master's Kick-off, he tells, far from blind to the risk of tunnel vision that can arise when you've been immersed in the material for a lengthy period of time.
“Having people to throw ideas around with now and then is a great bonus, people who maybe don't fully understand the matter; they see it with new eyes so they can sometimes offer the most ingenious ideas.” As he himself says, team captain plus CEO Van Meer has definitely seen an idea already that he is keen to explore with his team and startup.
Whether that idea happens to be ‘Planet Pots’, in which master's students Jens van Helden and Maas van Apeldoorn are among those involved, is still open to speculation. The pair has just given a short but punchy pitch of their group's concept - and at any rate Van Meer now appears charmed by the simplicity of their idea, which they argued well.
A plant pot made of obsidian (‘the pot that saves your plan(e)t’) is the product the group is keen to produce and market for an attractive but nicely profitable price. The properties of this glossy black rock make it ideally suited to this use, propose the pair, “it absorbs CO2 and more, and helps to maintain your plant. Besides, it's simply a cool material, and beautiful too.”
Both out-of-the-box and simple
Other ideas that came up during the brainstorming phase included obsidian as a fertilizer enhancer, “but first you'd have to do a lot of research on that. We wanted out-of-the-box, and at the same time to keep it simple. With the plant pot, you can get going and make a profit right away,” says Van Helden, the child of parents with their own company and who as such has been "steeped in business theory.”
Read on below the photo.
Not that he will be taking that same route; Van Helden will be taking the Master's of Automotive Technology, following on from the three-year bachelor's he did in London. This makes him “possibly this week's oddest international,” says this newcomer to TU/e, originally from Tiel. He counts himself lucky to have Dutch friends, whom he can call on when he needs help finding his way through higher education in the Netherlands - and Eindhoven. For many other internationals this could easily be a whole lot trickier, he can well imagine. This realization has prompted fellow group member and prospective Data Science student Van Apeldoorn, who by contrast has spent a number of years at TU/e, to share his number with international group mates, “they can always call me if they need help with something.”
As for the Master's Kick-off, mostly online due to corona, Van Helden thinks it is “really well organized”, but hardly what he's call sociable. Not that TU/e can do anything about that, he points out, “but naturally this week I would have preferred to have simply had a beer with everyone.”
Sound barrier
Two rooms away Luka van der Sande is standing alone at a high table on which sits her laptop. With her TU/e background in engineering and management she feels something of an oddity among the 'hard sciences' students in her multidisciplinary group this afternoon, she seems to be saying. “At Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences I often wasn't even aware that I was studying at a university of technology. Today the others here are nattering about all sorts of chemistry things and at times it makes me think, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Her group has come up with the idea of a sound barrier made of obsidian, which if placed beside motorways, for example, could absorb not only the noise, but also the CO2 emissions of the traffic rushing by. Twofold benefit - although she is still uncertain whether her group can win with this idea today. “It's a good idea, but I think how you pitch your idea makes all the difference.”
Van der Sande (who will be doing the master Operations Management and Logistics) says that neither the environment nor sustainability has figured prominently for her to date, “with the exception of separating household waste”. But a documentary about recycling and “all the plastic in the world” clearly planted a seed not so long ago - and that prompted her to choose this challenge today.
And thanks to the challenge for the first time in months she is back on the campus she knows so well - she got to know it in the years before this Master's Kick-off and it is where she has built a significant part of her social life. “It's weird,” she feels. And however careful she has been these past few months and however faithfully she still observes the 1m 50 rule, “you still have this automatic reaction to start hugging people again.”
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