Industrial Crystallization

Samenvatting
The lecture given by Gerrit Westhoff will be about Industrial Crystallization. The crystallisation process is the production of a crystalline solid phase from an amorphous solid, a liquid, or gaseous state. Crystallisation is important as a separation process for concentrating or preparing substances in a pure state. The economic importance of crystallisation is large.

Crystallisation is used for the production of a broad range of materials. The crystallisation processes are performed in a large variety of crystallisers. For certain products, huge quantities of crystalline material are produced, e.g., ammonium sulphate (fertiliser), potassium nitrate (fertiliser), adipic acid (basic material for the production of nylon), sodium chloride and sugar. On the other hand, relatively small quantities of crystalline products are manufactured in the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industries; some product examples are: lactose and aspartame (sweetener).

He will present (and illustrate with examples) how academic knowledge about crystallisation processes can be used to optimize industrial crystallization processes.

Curriculum vitae Dr.ir. G.M. Westhoff
Gerrit Westhoff was born in the Noordoostpolder in 1974, The Netherlands. He received his MSc in Food Process Technology at the Agricultural University Wageningen in 1998. He obtained his PhD at the Delft University of Technology in 2002. The topic of his PhD research was: Design and analysis of suspension crystallizers. Aspects of crystallization kinetics and product quality. He published several scientific papers related to this topic in different journals such as Chemical Engineering Science. In 2005, he completed his MBA at the TSM Business School of the University of Twente.

Gerrit Westhoff started as researcher process technology in 2002 at FrieslandFoods. He developed two new production processes, which are patented. In the period 2004 till 2008, he was as a senior technology manager involved in different projects in Asia, Europe, and Middle-East related to process optimization and implementation of new production processes.

In 2008-2014, he executed as an overall project manager technology a number of investment projects between 5 and 30 million euro. He developed his expertise in process development, process engineering, and project management. Since 2015, he is working as Business Group Technology Manager at FrieslandCampina Consumer Products. He is leading and developing a group of project managers and process technologists. This group is supporting approximately 20 factories (in Europe, Middle-East, and Africa) in investment projects and optimization of production processes.

Besides his professional carrier, he is also board member of the NPT (Nederlandse Vereniging van Procestechnologen) and participating in the Working Party Quality by Design of the European Federation of Chemical Engineers (EFCE). In 2013, he was also contributing to the organization of the 9th European Congress of Chemical Engineering (ECCE9) in The Hague.