Curriculum

During your Master’s in Chemical Science & Engineering (CSE), you will collect a total of 120 EC within two years. The specialisation in Chemical & Process Engineering (CPE) consists of five compulsory courses, a profile of your choice, elective courses, an internship and your final master’s assignment.

In addition, you can fill up your free space with elective courses that interest you, both in and outside of the Master’s in CSE. Choosing a Capita Selecta is also an option. This is a self-study course in which you explore a specific topic of your interest, supported by a researcher of the related research group.

European Credit Transfer System

Student workload at Dutch universities is expressed in EC, also named ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System), which is widely used throughout the European Union. In the Netherlands, each credit represents 28 hours of work.

Structure

Year 1	Number of EC
Compulsory courses	32,5 EC	Advanced Chemical Reaction Engineering Advanced Catalysis Advanced Molecular Separations Process Plant Design incl. Thermodynamics and Flowsheeting Process Dynamics & Control
Profile You choose one of the four profiles mentioned.	10 - 15 EC	Electrification of Chemical Processes Electrification of Chemical Process Ind. [ECPI] Electrochemistry; fundamentals and techniques Electrochemical Engineering Electrocatalysis: Materials and Spectroscopy Principles of Advanced Process Engineering Transport Phenomena Design and simulation of chemical batch processess Scaling-up in Chemical Engineering Process Optimization Circular Process Design Sustainable Organic Chemistry Exergy Analysis Sustainable Chemicals Sustainable Fuels (Membrane) Separations for a Clean Environment Advanced Colloids and Interfaces Ion Transport in Fluids Electrochemical Engineering Membrane Processes Membrane Materials
Elective courses You can choose electives that are either related to the CPE-specialisation or courses from other specialisations or even other UT-master’s.	Elective courses should make up a total of 120 EC	Examples of electives Process Optimization Scaling-up in Chemical Engineering Multi-component Mass Transport Innovating Reactor Systems Transport Phenomena Cost Management and Engineering Advanced Colloids and Interfaces Process Equipment Design Theory of Phase Equilibria Lab Course in Sustainable Process Technology Numerical Methods for Engineers
Year 2
Internship & Job Orientation Project	20 EC	In the first quartile of your second year, you will do an internship as preparation for the professional field.
Master’s thesis	40 EC	You will finish your Master’s in CSE with your master’s thesis. You will complete this assignment at one of the research groups related to this specialisation.
Total EC	120 EC

Or meet online with a student to gain first-hand experience!

Profiles

The specialisation Chemical and Process Engineering offers four different profiles:

Electrification of Chemical Processes
Replacing fossil fuels with electrical systems in process engineering requires significant adaptation and sometimes replacement of existing processes.
Principles of Advanced Process Engineering
A deep dive into more advanced principles of process engineering.
Circular Process Design
Can the waste product of a product be used as a raw material for the same or a different process? Can we recycle plastics more efficiently and cheaper? There are plenty of challenges and opportunities in creating circular processes.
(Membrane) Separations for a Clean Environment
Separating undesirable compounds from water streams is becoming an increasingly important topic. Membranes are one way to accomplish separations.

Internship

During your Master’s in Chemical Science & Engineering, you will gain practical experience by doing an internship for approximately three months. Within the specialisation in Chemical & Process Engineering, there are many options open to you when it comes to choosing your internship.

For example, you can look into the efficiency of existing chemical processes at a company and identify possible improvements. Or you can delve into a new process for producing a material or product and investigate its performance with experiments or simulations. The types of companies where you can complete your internship is quite diverse, from refineries such as Shell or Exxon, to the food and beverage industry, like FrieslandCampina or Grolsch and from waste processors like Twence to innovative engineering companies such as HoSt, Zeton or BTG. Another option is to do your internship at an (international) university and contribute to high-end research projects.

Master's thesis

You will complete your Master’s by writing your master’s thesis. The choice of your graduation subject is largely up to you. You could focus on research themes such as bio-refinery, CO₂removal and conversion, plastic recycling or water purification, to name some examples. Whether you want to delve deeper into membrane technology, catalytic processes and materials, polymers, soft matter or films in fluids, many options are open to you!

You will write your thesis under the supervision of a professor of one of the research groups. Under certain conditions, you could (partially) execute your research project at an external institution or organisation as well.

Your master’s thesis could involve investigating questions such as:

How can we take CO₂ back out of the atmosphere on massive scale to mitigate climate change, and use CO₂as a feedstock to make base chemicals?
How can we produce chemicals, like polyols, from biomass to further reduce the usage of fossil fuel sources? And what is the impact of impurities on the catalytic hydrogenolysis of biomass targeting polyols?
What is the underlying mechanism in protein mass transport during ultrafiltration which is a key part of whey separation? And can this knowledge be used in improving the existing processes?

Research