Science in Focus

University of Groningen scientists have developed new ways to make green plastics, but it is difficult to produce them at competitive prices.

A changing climate affects all sorts of things, from energy and food supplies to natural disasters such as floods. Researchers at the University of Groningen work on models to get a better grip on such changes, and to be able to make predictions.

Regional water authorities are sometimes forced to discharge waste water from our sewage system untreated. ‘It then ends up in a canal or a lake,’ computer scientist Dilek Düştegör explains. She collaborates with municipalities and regional water authorities to develop computer models to best manage wastewater flow.

Biotechnologists Gert-Jan Euverink and Tom Sleutels work on improving purification of wastewater to prevent pollutants being discharged into surface water.

Environmental scientist Winnie Leenes demonstrates that having enough drinking water is not the only thing that matters: instead, we should concern ourselves with the total consumption of freshwater, and how our consumption may damage the ecosystem.

From medical diagnoses to autonomous weapons in the Middle East: artificial intelligence (AI) is making more and more decisions on its own without a human involved. Rineke Verbrugge, Professor of Logic and Cognition at the University of Groningen, believes that has to change.

The first molecular motor created by Ben Feringa was described 25 years ago (on 9-9-1999) in the journal Nature.

Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas: by reacting with other compounds in the atmosphere, it may contribute to global warming in several ways.

Because hydrogen is a much smaller molecule than natural gas, it can easily leak. Even worse, despite its small size, hydrogen can affect larger materials and make them as brittle as glass.

Professor of Energy Conversion Aravind Purushothaman Vellayani is working on systems that use hydrogen to produce electricity – for large factories, for instance. But even your car or your toilet could be capable of producing electricity from hydrogen.

A sustainable way to produce hydrogen has been around for a century, but it is still much cheaper to make hydrogen from natural gas. Researchers from the UG are working on more efficient, affordable, and scalable production of green hydrogen.

Green hydrogen holds many promises. But grey hydrogen from natural gas is still much cheaper, storage of hydrogen is not trivial and as an indirect greenhouse gas is not as clean as it might look.