Research Associate in Digital-Twin of Fischer-Tropsch Reactors; DigiTwin

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Working under the guidance of Professor Mo Zandi and Dr James McGregor, the post-holder will be working on the Great British Chemicals funded project Digi Twin-FT. GBC is a National Research & Innovation Centre for Sustainable Industrial Futures funded by EPSRC and NERC, the centre will unite the UK chemical industry, academic researchers and policy makers to advance innovative, scalable and sustainable technology solutions for defossilising chemicals manufacturing.

We aim to create people-focussed opportunities to truly shape sustainable carbon management.

The post-holder will be part of the Digi Twin-FT project team working to develop and establish the foundational building block for scaling up CO2-to-fuel Fischer-Tropsch (FT) reactors using a predictive digital twin.

Leveraging the University of Sheffield's existing pilot-scale infrastructure, we will synthesise operational dataset inputs (CO2, H2) to validate a high-fidelity digital twin. Developed in co-creation with our non-academic partner, Siemens, this digital framework will simulate thermo-kinetic behaviours at commercial scales. The project delivers an early-stage techno-economic and life-cycle scoping model, mitigating scale-up risks and accelerating the UK's transition to manufacturing domestic, circular chemicals from waste carbon.

The post-holder should have a background in chemical process engineering, with a strong background in process modelling and digital twins. An understanding of carbon dioxide utilisation is preferred though not essential as immersive training will be provided. This is a unique opportunity to work on cutting edge research with some of the leading players in industry and academia with a focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions while creating value added chemicals within a circular carbon economy.

The successful candidate will perform digital twin development, data analysis and will be able to gain experience working with Siemens commercial software.

• Lead the extraction, cleaning, and structuring of historical and live operational datasets from the pilot-scale Fischer-Tropsch (FT) reactor.
• Develop, calibrate, and validate hybrid physics-informed and surrogate models integrating multi-phase fluid dynamics, reaction kinetics, and heat/mass transfer.
• Computationally extrapolate the pilot-scale twin to commercial boundary conditions, virtually mapping thermal runaway hotspots, fluid dynamic bottlenecks, and catalyst deactivation profiles.
• Execute early-stage TEA and screening LCA scoping models using simulated commercial outputs to evaluate levelised product costs and carbon mitigation metrics.
• Drive the day-to-day delivery of Work Packages, taking ownership of deliverables to ensure strict adherence to timelines.
• Maintain clean, robust, well-documented, version-controlled code repositories and reproducible data pipelines.
• Collaborate directly with industrial partners and software providers (e.g., Siemens) to align digital twin architectures with commercial engineering design workflows.
• Coordinate knowledge exchange across the Great British Chemicals (GBC) community, sharing…