PhD Studentship: Characterisation and Scale-up of Rotor-Stator Mixers for Sustainable Manufacturing

This 3.5-year PhD project is fully and covers the home tuition fees and a tax-free stipend equivalent to the current standard UKRI rate (£19,237 for 2024/25). EU nationals with settled or pre-settled status can also apply but their application eligibility will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

The project must start in September 2024. We are accepting applications until the position is filled, and the vacancy may close without notice. If you are interested in this position, it is highly recommended you apply as soon as possible.

The fast-moving consumer goods industry is worth over £4 trillion annually and includes a wide range of essential goods such as food and beverages, personal care products, and household items. Despite this industry's crucial role in society, it still encounters significant technological challenges associated with incomplete knowledge of how the microstructure of complex product formulations affects their flow properties. This leads to production scale-up issues and challenges related to batch-to-batch inconsistencies, usually associated with mixing operations. Moreover, there are constant changes to product formulations every year driven by rapidly evolving consumer needs. Mixing equipment needs to be robustly designed to ensure that new products can be produced at the same or higher capacity in existing manufacturing plants across the globe.

In this project, we will characterise rotor-stator mixers as an efficient technology for robust manufacturing processes of formulated liquids in the personal care and food industries. Rotor-stator mixers consist of a rotor, which typically has blades or teeth attached, and a stationary stator with slots or grooves. The rotor rotates at high speeds within the stator, creating a shearing and mixing action as the product passes through the narrow gap between the rotor and stator. This results in intense turbulence and high shear forces, effectively dispersing, emulsifying, and blending the components of the mixture.

The objectives entail studying the flow dynamics and power characteristics of these devices across a wide range of liquid rheological properties (e.g., dense emulsions and highly concentrated surfactant solutions). For this, we will use a combination of Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations and experimental measurements to assess pumping capacity and power dissipation for different mixer geometries and operational conditions. This will be done across different equipment scales (from lab to fully industrial) to deliver design and scale-up rules for a wide range of products, which are invaluable to the industry. The project will use the full range of high-shear mixing equipment existing in the James Chadwick Building of the Department of Chemical Engineering.

The project is partially funded by Unilever, which is one of the world's largest consumer goods companies. The project will involve strong engagement with the Modelling & Analytics for Processing team at Unilever R&D.

Through this project, you will gain proficiency in various computational and experimental techniques used to analyse mixing equipment. These skills are highly valued across a wide range of industries.

Applicants should have, or expect to achieve, at least a 2.1 honours degree or a master’s (or international equivalent) in Chemical Engineering or other relevant science or engineering-related disciplines.

Applicants are encouraged to contact Dr. Claudio Fonte with a cover letter and a copy of their CV at claudio.fonte@manchester.ac.uk for informal enquiries.

Advert information