2 PhD: Process intensification and Electrification in the Chemical Industry

Doctorat / PhD Type de contrat : TEMPORARY Date limite de candidature : 2026-12-01T23:59:59+01:00

The two PhD-positions are part of the large Dutch research project ‘CO2URAGE: CO2 Utilisation via Reactive Adsorption based on intermittent Green Electricity’, built on a private-public partnership with Industry, the Dutch research council (NWO), and academia. Your job The CO2URAGE program addresses the major societal challenge of transitioning the process industry from fossil fuels to natural resources powered by green electricity. It develops advanced reactors that use process intensification and electrification, and new materials for CO2 capture and react it with electricity-based hydrogen. Since the supply of green energy fluctuates, these reactors must operate dynamically, radically different from current industrial practices. In CO2URAGE, new process control schemes are developed to tailor production to dynamic operations, and system modeling and simulations are performed on different system scales to assess their feasibility in terms of economics and ecological performance. Research Focus : The transition to renewable electricity is reshaping the conditions under which the chemical industry operates. Electricity and hydrogen prices will fluctuate, at times even turning negative, so processes that can adjust their operation to these signals may become more competitive and better prepared for a future with high renewable surplus electricity. PhD-position 1 – Process and system design and optimization This first PhD-project aims at directly supporting the technology development carried out in CO2URAGE by understanding the technology optimal operation in future systems and by identifying the key properties that make them competitive. Accordingly, you will develop optimization models (mixed-integer linear programming) that capture the essential dynamic behaviour of these technologies, such as part-load performance, ramping limits, operating windows, and startup and shutdown behaviour, in a form suitable for time and space-resolved system optimization. You will use these models to determine the optimal design and operation of production systems under electricity and hydrogen price scenarios for 2030, 2040 and 2050. The research will move across the plant, cluster and the system level. It will examine how these processes interact with local renewable generation, batteries, hydrogen storage, electrolysers and heat supply in a (Dutch) industrial cluster. It also explores how large, flexible chemical plants can support national electricity, hydrogen and CO2 infrastructures. You will work closely with fellow PhD candidates and with industrial partners including RWE, DNV, TenneT and Gasunie. PhD-position 2 – Value chain design and life cycle assessment Whether new technologies for converting CO2 into base chemicals succeed depends not only on the technologies themselves, but also on the value chains around them. These chains run from CO2 sources and renewable power supply to the end users of the products. Understanding how these technologies could be deployed at scale therefore requires linking energy system modelling with value chain design. Accordingly, this PhD-project will develop deployment scenarios together with industrial partners. You will build a new hybrid modelling framework that combines agent-based modelling, which simulates how heterogeneous actors make decisions and adapt to change, with mixed-integer linear optimization, which identifies high-quality system configurations. The framework will be used to explore questions such as centralized versus decentralized deployment and the infrastructure requirements. It will then be applied to selected case studies for the technologies developed in the project. Finally, you will assess the environmental consequences of large-scale deployment through consequential life cycle assessment. This will reveal how growing demand and the corresponding expansion of the technologies affect the environmental performance of the system as a whole. This position will be co-supervised by Prof. Andrea Ramirez at TU Delft, including the possibility to work part-time at TU Delft. Societal relevance of the project : The transition to a CO2 net-zero society requires a major rethinking of the energy system, with coordinated, timely deployment of several technologies. Among the different sectors that need to become CO2 neutral, the chemical industry will be confronted with a daunting, yet existential challenge: to produce large amounts of carbon-based platform molecules starting from renewable energy and non-fossil material feedstocks. Given the scale of production and associated CO2 emissions, the large capital investments of plants, and the limited time available for the transition, the de-fossilization of the chemical industry is a cornerstone for a net-zero society. Many of the new unit operations required for a sustainable chemical industry are based on conventional chemical practices, for example hydrogen-base CO2 conversion. However, beyond feedstock changes, current chemical processes are not yet adapted to accommodate the dynamic nature of sustainable energy sources such as solar and wind. The main challenge will be matching the intermittent supply of green natural resources with product demand. CO2URAGE will help transforming the chemical industry into a key enabler for the energy transition.