Congratulations to Dr. Kordula Schnabl for an Excellent PhD Defense. Kordula has successfully defended his PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. Bert Weckhuysen, dr. Ina Vollmer and dr. Laurens Mandemaker.

In her thesis, Kordula has worked on the utilization of chitosan for potential industrial applications. One of these applications is an effective, highly porous, biobased support, which can efficiently hold active phases such as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and zeolites in its structure. Kordula developed a new synthesis route for these highly porous chitosan structures and investigated different ways to incorporate MOFs while keeping them active for CO2 conversion. Another potential application is to synthesize chitosan-based film materials, whose properties can be widely tuned with biobased green additives. Hence, she investigated a set of seven biobased additives which can vary the film’s properties from soft to stiff, and from clear to opaque, in their uptake behaviour into the chitosan matrix. Further, Kordula analyzed the film properties of the final material in its fresh state, as well as followed them over the period of 400 days in order to investigate their long-term stability and early signs of decay, such as yellowing and enhanced brittleness. She also investigated the possibility of varying the properties of chitosan on its own by depolymerization of the polymer with a set of heterogeneous supported bimetallic nanoparticles. With these catalysts, Kordula was able to roughly half the initial polymer chain length. Kordula proposed a rough depolymerization mechanism on the catalyst surface and proposed the role of the individual catalyst components. Finally, she showed the huge potential of chitosan in future industrial applications and potential future projects.

Kordula’s PhD thesis is available to read here.