FrieslandCampina Sustainability Award presented at Philips event to Suryojal, a collaborative venture of SELECT students
The FrieslandCampina Sustainability Award was presented at the final of the Philips Innovation Award, held on 14 May.
Frank van Ooijen presented the prize on behalf of FrieslandCampina to Suryojal, a collaborative venture of international students. Suryojal is Hindi for ‘water from the sun’ and that is exactly what the students are trying to achieve with technology. Elsa Valencia accepted the cheque for EUR 2,500. ‘We are harnessing solar energy to generate green energy and we’re distilling water into drinking water quality. We are currently working on the technological development and this prize will certainly help us with that.’
This was the first time that FrieslandCampina sponsored the Philips Innovation Award. Frank van Ooijen, director of sustainability: ‘Good ideas about nutrition and health are essential for the future. We need innovation to be sustainable.’
Here Elsa Valencia explains to us about the work:
We are very thankful with the PHIA and Friesland Campina for the Sustainability Award, it was a fun adventure to develop this technology, some of us were involved in the technical aspects, the R&D team made simulations to size the system properly and also predict the system's performance under different conditions, with this we are able to scale the system depending on the weather conditions (solar radiation) and the needs of the customer. On the other hand, the business team analyzed the market and decided to start with the case study of Egypt since they are among the driest places in the World.
We all made this project in different universities, our master, MSc. SELECT, requires mobility throughout different universities across Europe. So most of the time we worked long distance, some people was in Barcelona, others in Sweden, here in the Netherlands, others even went to India and Indonesia for their thesis project and worked in parallel with SURYOJAL. Now we are about to graduate, so we are still discussing what to do next and most importantly how because we are still spread all over Europe. We would like to test a prototype somewhere in the Netherlands, since its very central and we have good connections here, also we would like to explore other markets or places where this technology could be useful and competitive.
Here is the link to the short video we filmed for getting the votes.
>> Find more about the Philips Innovation Award