Smart, circular and integrated membrane solutions for water reuse and resource recovery in industry

We are looking for a motivated PhD student to develop and demonstrate tailored membrane solutions for the maximization of water and resource recovery in intensive water industries.

The PhD will be developed within the framework of the HORIZON-CL4-2023-TWIN-TRANSITION-01 project R3VOLUTION (GA:101138245) that aims at developing key innovations to enable economic, environmental, and operational water reclamation, addressing solutes and energy recovery challenges. The four-year project includes 19 partners from 9 different countries.

The PhD research work will be performed at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) (Barcelona, Spain) within the Department of Chemical Engineering, under the supervision of professors J.L. Cortina and E. Guillen. More specifically, the candidate will join the “Resource Recovery and Environmental Management - (R²EM)” research group, which has a vast experience in both membrane processes and recovery schemes. Nevertheless, it is expected that the candidate will spend some months during the 3^rd year of the project (2026) operating the pilot plant at the industrial site (CELSA - Castellbisbal, Barcelona, Spain) in compliance with all the safety regulations.

The PhD thesis will focus on the development and integration of a series of membrane processes for the recovery of water and solutes of the steel industry. The membrane solution will integrate the following processes: nanofiltration (NF), reverse osmosis (RO), membrane distillation (MD) and electrodialysis with bipolar membranes (EDBM) for the recovery of, at least, 90% of the water currently discharged (near zero-liquid discharge (ZLD)) and the recovery/production of NaOH/HCl from the super-concentrated solute stream. The candidate will participate in the characterization, testing, modelling and techno-economic assessment of the proposed solution and will have the opportunity to test it at pilot scale on-site. Additionally, it is expected that the candidate will contribute to all the tasks which are the responsibility of UPC during the course of the project (i.e., EU reporting, participation in meetings, C&D activities, etc.) 

The PhD project will address:

1. Preliminary modelling and theoretical evaluation of the proposed membrane schemes for the steel industry in terms of: water recovery, resource recovery, energy consumption, opex and capex.
2. Experimental evaluation (lab scale) of the different membrane technologies (steps in the membrane scheme) with commercially available membranes and novel membranes developed by the partners.
3. Generation of high-quality experimental data for scientific publications, model validation and eventually collaboration with the partners developing digital twins within the project.
4. Collaboration in the design and operation of the pilot to be tested on-site, generation of data and technoeconomic analysis of the results.
5. Dissemination of the PhD’s results in conferences and high rank international scientific journals.