Phd Scholarship Programme

**Eurecat**’s **Waste, Energy and Environmental Impact Unit (WEEI)** in partnership with **UPC - Barcelona Tech** offers a PhD Fellowship to develop the following thesis:
**_"New processes for the recovery of CRM from batteries"_**

**Eurecat's Waste, Energy and Envionmental Impact Unit (WEEI) **provides expertise and experience in developing and improving processes for (1) managing, reusing, and minimising waste, (2) assessing and choosing more efficient electrical and thermal systems and (3) designing and validating cells and batteries for electric vehicles. We deliver characterisation, simulation and modelling services in waste, energy and batteries for assessment and optimisation and we conduct studies for experimental validation and scaling-up of chemical, physical and biological processes, testing equipment and technologies and assessing the environmental and socioeconomic impact of processes and products.

**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.

The thesis will be framed in several projects: INNOCRM (internal project), HE Free4Lib and HE Intelligent.

**Functions and Responsibilities**

The research will deal with the development of hydrometallurgical processes for the recovery of Li, Co, Ni and Mn from spent batteries.

Work will be focused on:

- Separation and purification of extracts obtained in cathode and/or blackmass processing
- Production of CRM-based precursors for the synthesis of battery cathodes
- Chemical modelling of the developed processes. Database update for chemical modelling
- state of the art for the synthesis of precursors, experimental plan definition
- experiment at laboratory scale
- results evaluation
- co - authoring the scientific papers that will form part of the PhD dissertation
- **Requirements**

Studies and Knowledge:

- Advanced university degree (Master’s degree or equivalent) in chemistry, chemical engineering 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 (conferences and institutional visits).

Languages:

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