Vincent de Bie

August 22^nd 2016 till November 11^th 2016

An Internship for me was a chance to explore a company and to look into how a possible future job would look like. Therefore, I did my internship in the Netherlands at the company DSM in Geleen. With the help of my supervisor at the university and a former student of the university working at DSM, the internship was easily arranged. DSM offered me a room at Sittard, but I decided to stay at my recently obtained apartment in Utrecht. These long hours travelling would not hold me back of putting hard work into my project. .

My internship project was fully numerical and therefore most of the time I worked at a flex space in the DSM building. This way I would not see much of the work at DSM, but the employees of DSM took care of this by giving tours through the labs and telling stories about projects done at DSM. This showed that the nice part of DSM is that research is done, but it is also applied to industry. Furthermore, during my internship I could go to lectures or colloquium for my own interest. The company had some more interns which were nice to talk with about their countries, education and internship project during the breaks.

The topic of my project was the modeling of the crystallization kinetics of polyamide-6 (PA6). PA6 is often used in the film blowing process to make food packaging. A crystallization model was already produced by my supervisor at DSM and my task therefore was to improve this model with some important additions. To improve the model, I needed to look at the kinds of nucleation sources of crystals. Furthermore, I developed that the model visualizes the crystal size distribution over temperature.

During my internship at DSM I obtained a nice view on the kind of work I could be doing in the future. Furthermore, I developed my skills of doing research and saw how the research could be applied to industry. I see this internship as a great experience that brought me a step further in want I think I want to be doing in the future.