Dr Andrea Oyarzún-Aravena
Year started
2023
Subject
Chemical Engineering
Fellow Type
Postdoctoral By-Fellows,
Dr Andrea Oyarzún-Aravena is a Chemical Engineer and a Doctor of Engineering Sciences graduated at the Universidad de Concepción (Chile).
After completing her PhD on the study of gasification reactions using ab initio methods, Dr Oyarzún participated in the design and start-up of a small brewery in the Chilean Patagonian. In 2017 she joined the Universidad de Magallanes (Chile) as an Assistant Professor, where she taught Thermodynamics for undergraduates and led her first research project as a principal investigator. The research project allowed Dr Oyarzún to further explore carbon-gas interactions, sharpen her supervision skills and to develop a research network.
More recently, and with the Chilean government’s commitment to contribute to the development of renewable energies and a hydrogen economy, Dr Oyarzún was awarded a Chilean Postdoctoral research scholarship under the proposal “Morphological effects on the H2 adsorption capacity of carbon materials for on-site hydrogen storage” to take place at the group of Prof. Markus Kraft (CoMo group, https://como.ceb.cam.ac.uk) in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology of the University of Cambridge.
The aim of the project is to study the shape of some carbon materials in relationship with the storage of gases, such as H2. While investments on wind power and e-fuels production from green hydrogen are being made in the Chilean Patagonia, renewable energy is not constant and therefore either energy or hydrogen storage is a necessity to provide reliability of the systems. Porous solids are one of the possible options to tackle this problem, which is the focus of the research of Dr Oyarzún at the moment.
Together with her scientific interests, Dr Oyarzún loves working with images, taking pictures of animals and nature, painting and designing. She has had the opportunity to apply these abilities in the entrepreneur enterprise and whenever possible in her research. To a lesser extent, she has also explored music and video production as expression tools.
