Jonah Poort
Jonah carried out his research independently, with very little supervision needed. It was he who came up with the new idea's, methods etc. and not his supervisors.
Graduation committee - Prof.dr.ir. T.J.H. Vlugt, dr.ir. M. Ramdin, prof.dr.ir. W. de Jong, dr.ir. R. Delfos
Process factories produce many of the products people use on a daily basis, such as food and beverages, cleaning supplies, plastics, and fuels. These factories can be incredibly costly and time-consuming to build. Engineers therefore use process simulation software to estimate the profitability of a factory design before construction. However, such simulation software is founded on complex thermodynamic calculations that are slow to execute, consuming up to three-quarters of the total simulation time.
One group of computational methods that are both fast and flexible are Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), which can learn complex input-output relations from a given set of examples. In his thesis, Jonah used ANN to accelerate thermodynamic calculations up to 35 times. In addition, the flexibility of the ANN framework allowed for the development of two new calculation types that had never been performed before, enabling the development of potentially even faster process simulation software
