Qualification Type: | PhD |
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Location: | Newcastle upon Tyne |
Funding for: | UK Students |
Funding amount: | £20,780 - please see advert |
Hours: | Full Time |
Placed On: | 17th March 2025 |
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Closes: | 24th April 2025 |
Reference: | PINZ11-25 |
Award Summary
The studentship provides 100% fees (Home UK only), a minimum tax-free annual living allowance of £20,780 (2025/26 UKRI rate), and a research training support grant of £20,000.
Overview
The PINZ CDT will train the next generation of process and chemical engineers, and chemists, to develop the new processes, process technologies and green chemistries required for the process industries’ transition to Net Zero.
“Flow chemistry” is increasingly of interest in the chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries, to allow rapid process development and scale-up, whilst ensuring inherently more efficient continuous, rather than batch, processing.
In this project, novel laboratory-scale continuous reactors will be designed and 3d-printed, and applied to a variety of real reactions from industry, currently performed in batch, to demonstrate “process intensification” and rapid, scalable process development/optimisation. Previous work in the area by the Process Intensification Group has demonstrated that many batch processes can be made significantly “greener” via this method of process development. One recent example is a 200-fold reduction in reactor size while removing an organic solvent altogether, whilst maintaining productivity and improving yield/selectivity etc. We expect to achieve similar results with our current reactions, leading to huge reductions in carbon footprint, to help the process industries move towards Net Zero. Our 3d printing approach is highly flexible, meaning the impact of this work will be potentially far-reaching.
Number of awards: 1
Start date: 15th September 2025
Award duration: 4 years
Sponsor: EPSRC
Supervisors: Prof. Adam Harvey and Dr Jonathan McDonough
Eligibility criteria
You must have, or expect to gain, a minimum 2:1 Honours degree in a subject relevant to the proposed PhD project (usually chemical engineering or chemistry, or equivalent industrial experience but please get in touch if you think your qualification may be relevant). Enthusiasm for research, the ability to think and work independently, excellent analytical skills and strong verbal and written communication skills are also essential requirements.
Home applicants are eligible to apply and if successful will receive a full studentship.
How to apply
Once registered select ‘Create a Postgraduate Application’.
Use ‘Course Search’ to identify your programme of study:
You will then need to provide the following information in the ‘Further Details’ section:
Contact details: General enquiries: pinz.cdt@ncl.ac.uk
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