Kordula Schnabl

Kordula Schnabl

PhD candidate
Utrecht University

Kordula Schnabl

Department

Inorganic Chemistry and Catalysis

Contact information

Room
David de Wied Gebouw, 4th floor

Email address
k.b.schnabl@uu.nl

Key expertises

Waterborne coatings, Spectroscopy, film formation, depolymerization, polymer analytics

About me

I am PhD candidate in the group of Prof. Weckhuysen in Utrecht, working on coating formations from biobased raw materials like chitin. I am depolymerizing the crude polymer with different methods including mechanochemical routes and heterogeneously catalyzed ones. In the past, I did my Masters in photocatalysis studying the photocatalytic conversion of tertiary alcohols on rutile TiO2 (110). Therefore, catalysis spans throughout my whole education which I really enjoy.

About my research

My research is about valorizing biomass crude products to gain building blocks used for plastic alternatives. Therefore, I am depolymerizing chitosan to a smaller oligomer, soluble in water, to be used further as biobased alternative in the plastic production, and characterizer the resulting formed films. To depolymerize, I will take advantage of the broad knowledge of heterogeneous catalysis from our group, and combine it with a rather new, mechanochemical approach to aim for the best depolymerization efficiency.