Submitted by Kristina Newton on the 2020 winter session program in Luxembourg sponsored by the Department of Materials Science, the Department of Physics and the Department of History…
The previous week went very fast considering that we had a history exam, our second materials science exam, a tour of the Court of Justice of the EU and a very early train ride Friday morning to go to Germany. One of my favorite parts of this week was going on a brewery tour of the Bofferding Brewery in Luxembourg and visiting the steel mill in Duisburg. Beer is a deep part of the culture in Europe, with its popularity mainly stemming from Germany, but clearly in Luxembourg too. To attend our tour, we first took a bus ride from our hostel after our classes were over for the day to the site of the brewery. We began our tour with a discussion on the creation of the Bofferding Beer. The man guiding our tour stated that the beer follows the same strict guidelines present in Belgium for beer. We learned that the beer was made from barley or wheat and hops were added for additional flavor. We were able to walk through the facilities which were primarily self-automated. We were so surprised to discover that only 30 people worked in the facility each day, with most working in packaging. It was very interesting to hear about Bofferding, a beer that appears to deeply impact the country of Luxembourg.
When we arrived in Duisburg for the weekend, we immediately went on a steel mill tour. This was perfect since most students on the program are taking materials science and it allowed us to physically see the processes happening. We were required to wear hard-hats and safety glasses. The most interesting part was when we saw a huge container of molten iron ore being poured into an impurity material. There were sparks flying everywhere, smoke being quickly vacuumed away from vents and the material looking even more molten. We then followed the process in the factory to where the molten steel flowed after being mixed, through a tiny gap into a large trench. When we were watching, the 20-minute period of flow was stopped by using a massive machine to plug the hole and workers in heat protective gear began pouring in a sand material to clean the trench. I was expecting the tour to be fairly uninteresting, but I was surprised to find the tour of the facilities to be very cool and educational. We ended the tour by discussing the future of the steel industry with the specific factory reaching carbon free emission by the year 2050. From these experiences, I was able to understand the cultural and industrial aspects of Luxembourg and Germany.
