Today we visited our biggest company yet, Nouryon, a Dutch Chemical Company. It started with an early wake up and about a 1.5 hour drive to their Deventer facility. When we came in we got a welcome and a quick safety video. Then we got a presentation from an alumni of Pitt and a current employee at Nouryon.
The history of Nouryon is fascinating, it was started by two brothers who began making flour. Soon they received competition from imported flour from the US, which had a white color and was able to make white bread. The Dutch were unable to replicate the flour that would give the same results and began losing customers to the American flower. Soon the brothers discovered that oxidized flour allowed them to get the flour needed to make white bread. The rest is history. Now Nouryon produces chemicals and ingredients to certain products used everyday, from agriculture, to paints, additives to foods, and more.
After a quick lunch we were split into small groups and began our tour of the facility. My group started with the laundry and dishwasher detergent part. Here the workers would test different mixtures to see how effective they are at cleaning dishes. It was interesting to learn how the machines were set up because an important factor while testing is to control all the variables you can. Here the worker had huge jugs under a counter that was able to control the hardness of the water. Next we went to another building which showed us a couple cool experiments. where they ignited acetone and their chemical Trigonox 21X. We were told they are similar yet the reaction showed otherwise, the acetone burned normally but the Trigonox 21X had a higher flashpoint so a higher temperature flame was needed to ignite it and at first there was little to no difference in the flames but the Trigonox 21X suddenly got a bigger flame and started sparking until it burnt out about a minute later. Next we were shown a demonstration on how they test how a substance reacts when in enclosed spaces. This test is used to determine how much substance can be transported in certain containers.
After a decent trip back to Amsterdam we met with a couple Alumni from Pitt which was really fun to learn about their careers and how they ended up working here in Amsterdam. Not only that, many of them worked very interesting jobs. For example one of the alums worked for a company ASML, a chip manufacturer. They manufacture very expensive machines that create chips, so expensive in fact that they really have 7 companies. Yet 80% of revenue comes from sales. These machines can take a decade to go from the customer’s concept to a machine. One of the main things he mentioned was the size of these machines, he stated that a machine could be the size of the room we were in and one of their main problems was being able to transport it because these enormous machines have to fit through a door. This requires it to be taken apart for it to be sent and then put back together when delivered.
