PhD Studentship: Carbon Footprint Optimisation for Power Transformers

This is a 3 year industry funded PhD for home students. This will cover tuition fees and provide a tax free stipend set at the UKRI rate (£19,237 for 2024/25).

With the UK and global ambitions to achieve carbon net-zero by mid of the 21st century, carbon footprint (CF) management has become increasingly important across different industries. To reduce the carbon footprint of power transformers, a complete life cycle assessment (LCA) including raw materials, design, manufacture, transport, operation, maintenance, disposal and recycling is required. Based on over a century’s experience, design and operation of power transformers have been highly optimised, with peak energy efficiency reaching over 99%. However due to the sheer number of units and the long lifetime of power transformers, transformer losses including no-load loss and load loss is one of the major contributors to the carbon footprint of a transformer in operation.
On the other hand, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model is widely used to measure the whole lifetime cost of the transformer. In addition to the capital cost, cost of losses, commissioning cost, lifetime maintenance, replacement and disposal costs and environmental costs also add up to the total evaluated cost of a transformer. Different objective functions in terms of minimisation of TCO or CF will inevitably lead to different conclusions and yield varying advice on each stage of the transformer life cycle. LCA involves transformer users, manufacturers and material providers, therefore there is a need for collaboration among different stakeholders to properly develop the optimisation methodology. Furthermore, it is vital to incorporate the impact of any design modification on the reliability of the transformers. Hence this research aims to develop a multi-objective optimisation method to incorporate carbon footprint, total cost of ownership and the transformer reliability in selecting transformer designs.

Applicants should have, or expect to achieve, first class honours degree or a master’s (or international equivalent) in a relevant science or engineering related discipline. Applicants must be able to demonstrate their research experience through contribution to international journal or conference publications.

Please send your CV and detailed transcripts of all your previous and current university studies to Prof. Zhongdong Wang (zhongdong.wang@manchester.ac.uk) and Dr. Shanika Matharage (shanika.matharage@manchester.ac.uk) before you make an application.

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