PhD Studentship: Characterisation and Scale-up of Rotor-Stator Mixers for Sustainable Manufacturing

This 3.5-year PhD mission is totally and covers the house tuition charges and a tax-free stipend equal to the present customary UKRI charge (£19,237 for 2024/25). EU nationals with settled or pre-settled standing can even apply however their software eligibility will likely be decided on a case-by-case foundation.

The mission should begin in September 2024. We’re accepting purposes till the place is stuffed, and the emptiness could shut with out discover. If you’re on this place, it’s extremely really useful you apply as quickly as doable.

The fast-moving shopper items trade is price over £4 trillion yearly and contains a variety of important items similar to meals and drinks, private care merchandise, and home goods. Regardless of this trade’s essential function in society, it nonetheless encounters important technological challenges related to incomplete data of how the microstructure of advanced product formulations impacts their circulate properties. This results in manufacturing scale-up points and challenges associated to batch-to-batch inconsistencies, normally related to mixing operations. Furthermore, there are fixed modifications to product formulations yearly pushed by quickly evolving shopper wants. Mixing tools must be robustly designed to make sure that new merchandise may be produced on the similar or larger capability in current manufacturing crops throughout the globe.

On this mission, we are going to characterise rotor-stator mixers as an environment friendly expertise for strong manufacturing processes of formulated liquids within the private care and meals industries. Rotor-stator mixers encompass a rotor, which usually has blades or tooth connected, and a stationary stator with slots or grooves. The rotor rotates at excessive speeds inside the stator, making a shearing and mixing motion because the product passes by means of the slim hole between the rotor and stator. This leads to intense turbulence and excessive shear forces, successfully dispersing, emulsifying, and mixing the elements of the combination.

The aims entail finding out the circulate dynamics and energy traits of those units throughout a variety of liquid rheological properties (e.g., dense emulsions and extremely concentrated surfactant options). For this, we are going to use a mixture of Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations and experimental measurements to evaluate pumping capability and energy dissipation for various mixer geometries and operational situations. This will likely be achieved throughout totally different tools scales (from lab to completely industrial) to ship design and scale-up guidelines for a variety of merchandise, that are invaluable to the trade. The mission will use the total vary of high-shear mixing tools current within the James Chadwick Constructing of the Division of Chemical Engineering.

The mission is partially funded by Unilever, which is without doubt one of the world’s largest shopper items corporations. The mission will contain sturdy engagement with the Modelling & Analytics for Processing workforce at Unilever R&D.

By means of this mission, you’ll acquire proficiency in varied computational and experimental methods used to analyse mixing tools. These abilities are extremely valued throughout a variety of industries.

Candidates ought to have, or anticipate to attain, no less than a 2.1 honours diploma or a grasp’s (or worldwide equal) in Chemical Engineering or different related science or engineering-related disciplines.

Candidates are inspired to contact Dr. Claudio Fonte with a canopy letter and a replica of their CV at [email protected] for casual enquiries.