Doctorat / PhD — Advanced single cycle architectures to enhance the performance of Intermediate and High Temperature Heat Pumps

Doctorat / PhD Profil chercheur : First Stage Researcher (R1) Type de contrat : Temporary Date limite de candidature : 1 Dec 2026 - 17:00 (Europe/Madrid) Date de début : 1 Mar 2027 Programme UE : Horizon Europe - MSCA Référence : DC01 Département : Energy Engineering Domaine : Technology » Energy technology

Commercial Industrial High Temperature Heat Pumps (IHTHPs) currently top out at around 130°C in a closed cycle arrangement. Higher temperatures can be achieved though steam compression, typically to about 160°C. Market analysis of the technology indicates that despite the progress made so far, closed cycle IHTHPs running at 160°C are still mostly bespoke designs for specific applications due to several technical and economic hurdles. Most research and Development efforts today tackle only some of the technical hurdles yielding incremental gains but fall short of breakthroughs. This led to the conception of the project: Industrial decarbonisation using innovative low-grade heat upgrade ( HeatMind s) which succeeded in securing funding from the European Commission under the MARIE Skłodowska-CURIE ACTIONS Doctoral Network (DN) Scheme. HeatMinds will address the challenges in an integrated, step-change approach through conducting multidisciplinary research and development to further our understanding of IHTHP, both at the overall system and component levels while addressing sustainability, economic social impact and energy policy aspects to support realising its potential to provide a breakthrough towards full industrial heat decarbonisation while providing specialised training for 15 doctoral researchers to help establish the backbone of an important industry. Within HeatMinds, Work Package 1 will develop models that enable the selection and optimisation of heat upgrade system configurations that can span the intended wide temperature upgrade range and maximum temperature (~ 50 – 250 °C) using working fluids with negligible global warming potential. This job offer (DC01) is focused on the development and optimisation of advanced single-cycle architectures for industrial high-temperature heat pumps (IHTHPs), identifying the most suitable combinations of working fluid, cycle configuration and operating conditions for industrial heat upgrading. To this end, four technical objectives are set: (1) to explore advanced cycle configurations as a function of heat-source temperature and the required temperature lift; (2) to apply numerical thermodynamic optimisation and second-law analysis to develop the impact of cycle architectures on exergy losses along critical processes; (3) to explore the crossover from Rankine cycle to Brayton cycle architectures as sink temperature increases, and develop metrics to compare the impact on performance, footprint and system complexity; (4) to develop multiobjective optimisation tools to select working fluids, cycle architectures and operating conditions across organic and inorganic refrigerants and Rankine and…