We proudly announce that on the 25th of October 2019 the 2nd d|b|t|a Women in Chemical Engineering Day will take place. As last year, it will be a one-day-event that aims to give you insights into our research, our cooperation with industry and international partners. There will  be a lot of interesting contributions as a keynote talk by Dr. Sabine Ardey from BSH Home Appliances Group and a workshop given by the female leadership expert Vera Strauch [3]. The >Flyer< [4] for the event provides you with more information. You can register for the event by sending an e-mail to: xenia.gabrisch@tu-berlin.de [5], subject: Registration for the Women in Chemical Engineering Day 2019. Please provide your full name, your course of studies and university, and your current semester (BSc./MSc.). You will receive more information on the agenda after your registration. We are looking forward to your participation!

From 5th to 8th of August the world's greatest conference on mathematical optimization (ICCOPT2019) took place at the Technical University of Berlin. On invitation by Dr. Carmen Gräßle (MPI Magdeburg, left) and Tobias Keil (WIAS) Henning Bonart gave a talk in the session Optimal Control of Phase Field Models. Here, he presented our recent joint work with Dr. Christian Kahle (TU München, right) on the Active and Passive Control of Droplets through Optimal Contact Angle Distributions.

From April to June 2019 Henning Bonart visited Prof. Youssef Marzouk (right) and the Uncertainty Quantification Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. At MIT Henning Bonart was part of the Aerospace Computational Design Laboratory and affiliated with the Center for Computational Engineering. In this collaboration our work on the simulation and optimization of wetting droplets is combined with modern statistical methods to estimate multiphase parameters from simple experiments in a Bayesian setting. On invitation, Henning Bonart presented an overview of our work on Simulation and Optimal Control of Sliding Droplets on Surfaces with Topographic Structures and Variable Wettability in the lab's seminar. He successfully applied for a scholarship by the DAAD and was co-funded by the TU Berlin and the SFB/Transregio 63 InPrompt.

On the 7th of August 2019 Mr Dr.-Ing. Sven Kunkel successfully defended    his doctoral thesis. In his PhD thesis, he experimentally investigated the phase change behaviour of an eutectic mixture (Phase Change Material - PCM) in a thermal storage with direct contact between heating liquid an PCM. His contribution to understanding the occurring phenomena is a valuable advance in the scope of the energy revolution. The d|b|t|a sincerely congratulates and wishes all the best for his future.

From 22nd to 23rd of July the annual group retreat of d|b|t|a and our summer event took place. The whole group met at the Youth Hostel Ravensbrück and together we discussed the orientation and many different current topics. The evening was followed by a barbecue and cool drinks. We were very lucky that the next day gave us sunny wheather which was perfect for our draisine and swimming trip.

From 14th to 18th of July 2019 the d|b|t|a was represented at FOCAPD in Copper Mountain, Colorado (USA) with three posters. Joris Weigert presented his work concerning the optimization under uncertainties by  means of data-driven models, Christian Hoffmann showed his concept for the integration of design and operation using an economic NMPC and Erik Esche presented a comparison between Chance-Constrained Optimization and Two-Stage Stochastic Programming for design problems.