Rate My Professor Henk Huinink

Henk Huinink is Full Professor of Physics of Energy Storage at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), in the Department of Applied Physics and Science Education, leading the Thermo-Chemical Materials Lab within the Transport in Permeable Media group and affiliated with the Eindhoven Institute for Renewable Energy Systems (EIRES). He earned his MSc in polymer technology from TU/e in 1993 and PhD in Soft Matter from Wageningen University in 1997, with a thesis on statistical mechanical modeling of surfactants in pores. From 1997 to 1999, he was a Research Fellow at Shell, working on block copolymer thin films as part of an EU project on mesoscopic simulation methods. He joined TU/e in 2005 as assistant professor, advancing to full professor in 2025. In 2015, he took a sabbatical at the Center for Computational Chemistry at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen, studying atomistic modeling of crystal hydrates for thermal energy storage. He teaches courses including Statistical Physics, Computational and Mathematical Physics, Transport in Porous Media, Advanced Fluid Dynamics, and Fundamentals of Energy Harvesting and Storage. He participates in projects such as EU H2020 Heat Insyde, NWO Mat4Sus Mat4Heat, and EIC Pathfinder 4TunaTES.

Huininik's research focuses on phase transitions in crystals, interactions between solids and water, heat and mass transport in porous media, and NMR imaging and relaxometry, applied to thermochemical energy storage materials, particularly salt hydrates for thermal batteries enabling compact long-term heat storage via reversible hydration and dehydration. His contributions include identifying promising crystal hydrates, elucidating hydration/dehydration kinetics linked to nucleation-growth mechanisms, stabilizing salt hydrates through salt/organic composites, boosting power output via improved thermal conductivity, and promoting nucleation. Key publications are 'A review of salt hydrates for seasonal heat storage in domestic applications' (Applied Energy, 2017, 475 citations), 'In-depth investigation of thermochemical performance in a heat battery: Cyclic analysis of K2CO3, MgCl2 and Na2S' (Applied Energy, 2018, 178 citations), 'Stabilization of K2CO3 in vermiculite for thermochemical energy storage' (Renewable Energy, 2020, 146 citations), and the book 'Fluids in Porous Media' (IOP Concise Physics, 2016). With nearly 5,000 Scopus citations, his work advances sustainable energy technologies supporting UN SDGs 7 and 13.