Chemical Engineer @Diluvian (backed by Hexa)

About Diluvian

Diluvian builds containerized atmospheric water generators (10ft units) that produce drinking water from ambient air, off-grid, for defense, mining and remote industrial sites. The company is incubated by Hexa, the Brussels-based venture studio, and the first units go into the field in the coming months.

Why MOFs

Our first units run on a proven silica-gel desiccant, so we can ship fast and learn from real deployments. The next step is metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Water-stable MOFs such as aluminium fumarate (e.g. Basolite A520) show a steep uptake step at low-to-mid relative humidity and regenerate at lower temperature than classical desiccants. That could mean more litres per kWh and per kg of sorbent, especially in arid conditions. Your role is to turn that potential into validated, system-level data that drives our next unit generation.

What you'll do

• Co-design and build a water sorption test setup (humidity-controlled chamber, cycling bench, instrumentation) with our engineering team
• Source and benchmark commercial MOFs (e.g. BASF, Promethean Particles, NovoMOF) against our silica-gel baseline
• Measure water sorption isotherms, adsorption/desorption kinetics and regeneration temperature under realistic conditions (temperature, RH, cycle times)
• Run accelerated cycling tests (hundreds to thousands of cycles) to quantify capacity loss and structural stability
• Explore shaping and integration: pellets, binders, coatings on heat-exchanger or wheel supports, and the performance hit each implies
• Check water quality: metal and linker leaching against EU drinking water limits (Directive 2020/2184)
• Translate results into system-level numbers (L/kWh, L/kg sorbent/day, €/kg at scale) and clear material recommendations for our engineering team
• How we work
• Freelance, part-time, over the coming weeks and months; evenings and weekends are fine
• You won't build alone: our engineering team supports you hands-on on test-rig design, hardware and instrumentation
• Characterization runs in partner labs we have access to; you help decide which tests are worth running where
• You set your own experimental plan and milestones, and own the results. We provide context, budget and fast decisions
• You'll work directly with Diluvian's founders, Quentin Van Overmeere (CTO) and Arnaud Biebuyck (CEO)
• Who we're looking for
• MSc in chemistry, chemical engineering or materials science; PhD students and recent graduates welcome
• Hands-on lab experience, ideally with porous materials, adsorption or materials characterization (DVS, BET, XRD, TGA)
• High agency: you design the experiments, drive them to results, and tell us what the data means
• Bonus: familiarity with sorption-based AWG literature (MOF-801, MOF-303, Al-fumarate) or thermal systems