PhD Scholarship Programme (Vicente Lopez) Sustainable desalination schemes for climate change adaptation

Eurecat develops and optimises technologies and processes to improve the management of water, soil and air and associated resources conducting research, development, and innovation projects with businesses across all industries to enhance economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Through advanced modelling and experimental tools at various scales (laboratory, pilot plant and real scale) we develop and validate new technologies and their applications. At Eurecat, we work with a wide range of technologies for treating pollutants to mitigate their release into the natural environment and for resource recovery and to support the transition to a circular economy. We also design pilot projects and procedures tailored to businesses, thereby reducing the risk inherent to R&D by gradual implementation from conceptualisation to rollout through all development stages. Eurecat's Water, Air and Soil Unit’s knowhow coupled with the capabilities of Eurecat’s technology units enables us to deliver solutions for complex and specific problems across a wide range of sectors including water treatment, chemicals, food and agriculture, pharmaceuticals and materials processing and capital equipment.

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.