PDEng position in Energy and Process Technology: Carbon capture and utilization

The PDEng program is a 2-year post-MSc technological program with a focus on technological design. This program at the University of Twente contains an educational part that will be followed at the University of Twente, and a design project funded by a large corporation. Your research will be part of an EU-wide consortium. The educational program will have an in-depth and broadening character with ample attention for professional development and will be partly tailored to the design project.

About the project and your task

It is widely accepted that an increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration may result in the global warming of our planet. Many initiatives focus on CO2 capture from the industrial exhaust. An alternative is to tackle this problem by capturing CO2 directly from the atmosphere thereby eliminating the location restriction. The captured CO2 can be used for the production of liquid fuels, chemicals, or carbonation of soft drinks. The objective of the present research is to design, develop, and test a novel, solid sorbent-based direct air capture reactor which captures CO2 from the ambient air and releases it as a CO2-rich gas suitable for further use.

The research activity of this PDeng position focuses on designing a sorbent-based direct air capture reactor. For this purpose, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model will be developed and used for the design and optimization of the reactor.

This research will be part of a larger project in which several other related technologies will be investigated by different research groups within Europe.