Phd Scholarship Programme

**EURECAT**:
Eurecat, Technology Centre of Catalonia, brings together the expertise of 650 professionals and serving more than a 1.700 companies. Applied R + D, more than 200 projects, technological services, highly specialized training, 88 patents, 7 spin-offs, technology consulting and professional events are some of the services that Eurecat offers for both small and medium-sized companies of all sectors. The added value provided by Eurecat accelerates innovation, decreases spending on scientific and technological infrastructures, reduces risks and provides specialized knowledge to each company.

**Job description**:
Furthermore,** R2EM group of UPC-Barcelona Tech** is developing research activity on development of sustainable urban and industrial waste management cycles based on resource recovery approaches promoting circular solutions of waste to product and waste to energy. Research also involves efforts on developing environmental remediation solutions for soils and ground water remediation, process and environmental monitoring and environmental risk

**Eurecat**’s **Water, Air and Soil Unit** in partnership with **R2EM group from UPC - Barcelona Tech** offers a PhD Fellowship to develop the following thesis:
**"Sustainable desalination schemes for climate change adaptation"**

The research will deal with the development of new desalination process with lower environmental impact than the conventional ones based on reverse osmosis. Particularly, it will design and validate at lab and bench scale an alternative desalination scheme based on membrane distillation (MD) combined with high-efficiency brine treatment technologies using novel developed membranes to recover water and salts from salty water, considering brackish water, wastewater, and seawater. Smart-energy management strategies based on the creation of digital twins of will be used for optimizing the energy consumption of the alternative and conventional desalination processes, reducing the carbon footprint of water production. The proposed research will address the main drawbacks of the current desalination process, promoting sustainable solutions for alternative high-quality water production in the context of climate change

**Functions and Responsibilities**
- Knowing the state of the art for the alternative desalination procesess
- He/she will define the experimental plan and carry out the experiments at laboratory and bench scale
- Analysing the experiments results
- To scale-up at pilot scale and follow-up of results
- He/she will also be responsible for co-authoring the scientific papers that will form part of the PhD dissertation.

**Requirements**:

- **Requirements**

Studies and Knowledge:

- Master’s degree or equivalent in chemical engineering, chemistry or similar.

Soft Skills:

- Collaborative person able to work in a team of researchers. Also, able to work in an autonomous way.
- Skills to communicate/document the results in a comprehensible and professional way.
- High motivation for the research topic and strong compromise for work.
- A certain degree of mobility is expected due to PhD requirements such as conferences, institutional visits and a stage in Korea.

Languages:

- High oral and written communication skills in English
- Knowledge of Catalan or Spanish is desirable.

**Job**: Investigador/a en Formación**Department**: WAS**Location**: Manresa (Spain)**Contract**: Temporary**Working day**: Full time**Sector**: Energy**Vacancies**: 1**Discipline**: R&D**Work modality**: On site