This year's prize for outstanding theses and dissertations from the Faculty of Mechanical, Process and Energy Engineering at TU Bergakademie Freiberg went to Hemanth Gunda and Ralf Ditscherlein. The Heinrich Schubert Prize was awarded for the fifth time on 16 November.
Since 2019, the prize has been awarded annually to students and doctoral candidates for excellent junior research in mechanical process engineering, mineral processing or recycling. At the "Mineral Processing and Recycling" conference, Dean Prof Andreas Bräuer presented the award to the prizewinner, commemorating the work of former chair holder Prof Heinrich Schubert. Both prizewinners took part in the conference online.
Hemanth Gunda was awarded the prize for his master's thesis "Numerical simulation of compressible cake filtration at constant pressure". In it, he investigated the compressibility of the first layers of a filter cake due to the higher pressure acting on the incrementally formed filter cake layers. He thus made an important contribution to the understanding of non-ideal processes at the beginning of cake filtration.
Dr.-Ing. Ralf Ditscherlein was honoured for his dissertation entitled "A Contribution to the Multidimensional and Correlative Tomographic Characterization of Micron-Sized Particle Systems". In his work, he developed methods for the dispersion of particle samples for analysis in the computer tomograph (X-ray microscope), whereby particle-discrete data sets can be generated, i.e. information is available for individual particles with regard to their three-dimensional shape. He was also able to show that this computed tomographic particle data can be combined with other analysis methods to draw conclusions about the chemical composition and determine particle distributions over several orders of magnitude.
About the Heinrich Schubert Prize
The former chair holder Prof. Dr.sc.techn. Drs.h.c. Heinrich Schubert (1926-2018) made outstanding contributions in Germany and abroad in the fields of mechanical process engineering and mineral processing technology. The prize named after him honours individuals who have demonstrated their excellence in mechanical process engineering, mineral processing or recycling as part of a student thesis or doctorate. The award was presented with a certificate, the Heinrich Schubert Medal and prize money of 500 euros each at the annual "Mineral Processing and Recycling" conference. The prize money for 2023 was donated by the Processing Division of the Association of Friends and Sponsors of TU Bergakademie Freiberg.