Arctic Reflections

We have been nominated for the Benelux #ClimateTech 100 awards! You can vote for us at https://lnkd.in/eCBbvrB5 This is really easy: just click "vote", and then create an account in 2 clicks. Voting for us really helps us in our journey to restore Arctic sea ice to counter global warming! #BeneluxClimateTech100

We are very pleased that Willem Schellingerhout has joined us as an advisor. Willem has extensive experience in offshore wind, in various engineering roles, and has already helped us in many ways in a very hands-on style. He holds a BSc as a Maritime Officer from the Rotterdam School of Management.

We are excited to have been admitted to the Oceans Stream at CDL-Atlantic! Creative Destruction Lab is a great mentorship program for ocean-oriented initiatives like ours, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. We are looking forward to engage with the mentors of the program, and becoming part of the thriving Canadian ocean start-up ecosystem. #buildsomethingmassive

Nice interview with Arctic Reflections founders Tom and Fonger in Het Financieele Dagblad by Ardi Vleugels (in Dutch) https://lnkd.in/ep9Vnt4J

Here is a short video about Arctic Reflections, including interviews with the founders Tom and Fonger. Thanks to our InnovationQuarter, and especially Karolien Sas, for making this video for their year event, and allowing us to use it as well! https://lnkd.in/e-9EANga

We are proud to announce a collaboration with TWD, a leading Offshore Method Engineering & Equipment Design company, to help us with our next steps towards our mission to restore Arctic sea ice. Read more about this sustainable partnership: https://lnkd.in/e6dH9cMQ #Engineering #Collaboration #OffshoreEngineering

Today is Arctic Sea Ice Day! The importance of sea ice as a regulator for the global climate cannot be overstated. Also, sea ice is crucial to support Arctic biodiversity, and indigeneous ways of living in the Arctic. Image courtesy of Polar Bears International

Meet Marawan Abdel Rahman, our new mechanical engineering intern! Marawan is working on an Arctic Thermal energy conversion graduation project to try and use the heat difference between the temperature of the water under the ice and the temperature of the air above the ice using a Rankine Engine to power water pumps and possibly other appliances. Marawan has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in the department of energy and thermal sciences from Nile University in Egypt where he has helped build the university’s first educational wind tunnel. Moreover, Marawan has a passion for CFD thermal analysis from several projects he has done during his bachelor’s and master’s programs at TU Delft. Marawan enjoys travelling through Europe, football and collecting coins. #climatechange #climatetech #intern

The ice is gone in Vallunden on Svalbard! With our field test there together with researchers from Delft University of Technology and The University Centre in Svalbard, we aim to validate that thickening ice in winter makes it last longer in summer. Here you see the lake on 12th of April (during the field test campaign), 31st of May (when the thickened ice really started to be more reflective than the surrounding ice) and the early morning of the 19th of June (when warmer water really came in from the fjord, washing the ice away, with the thickened ice blocking it coming in further for quite a while). The satellite image is on the 18th of June, the last day you could still see the ice cover, with three white dots indicating the thickened ice. What have we learned so far? 💡 The thickened ice in the end does actually not materially last longer, due to the warmer water coming in from the side and also melting from below. This will be different in open water, where solar irradiation directly on the ice is the dominant factor, although melting (especially the last part) is clearly not a linear process 💡 The thickened ice stays whiter (and thus more reflective) for quite a long transitionary period, and early calculations from the radiation data (incoming and outgoing) indicate a substantial amount of energy gets reflected additionally because of this. We think this is the first time this has been observed, which is really unique! Of course, we need to do more analysis to understand whether this is a repeatable and scalable effect Currently, we are busy analysing the radiation data as well as the temperature profiles of the ice, to establish how the ice slowly heats up over time and then starts to melt from top and bottom. Stay tuned (i.e. follow Arctic Reflections) for more updates!

We are very happy with the support we get from TWD on our tech roadmap, their structured approach is really helpful towards our mission to preserve Arctic sea ice. Thanks Niels Rombout, Nimmi Sreekumar and colleagues for the collaboration so far!