PhD Studentship: 3D-Printed Reactors for Shrinking Chemical Processes

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: 15^th 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:

• Search for the ‘Course Title’ using the programme code: 8856F.
• Leave the ‘Research Area’ field blank
• Select ‘PhD in Process Industries; Net Zero (PINZ’) as the programme of study.

You will then need to provide the following information in the ‘Further Details’ section:

• A ‘Personal Statement’ (this is a mandatory field) - upload a document or write a statement directly in to the application form.
• The studentship code PINZ11-25 in the ‘Studentship/Partnership Reference’ field
• ‘Research Proposal’ - when prompted for how you are providing your research proposal – select ‘Write Proposal’. You should then type in the title of the research project from this advert. You do not need to upload a research proposal.

Contact details: General enquiries: pinz.cdt@ncl.ac.uk

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