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Vacancy Information
Applications are invited for a PhD studentship in the area of Crystallization & Microprocess Engineering. The position is at the Department of Chemical Engineering. The studentship, fully funded by EPSRC and tenable for 3 years, will be available from April 2012.
Studentship Description
Crystallization is widely used in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals during the intermediate and final stages of purification and separation. Over 90% of all pharmaceutical products, such as tablets, aerosols, capsules and suspensions, contain drugs in particulate, and usually in crystalline, form. The process defines drug chemical purity and physical properties such as crystal morphology, size, size distribution, habit and degree of perfection. Normally, crystals are manufactured in bulky batch reactors, which are thus difficult to control.
Continuous-flow microreactors offer the opportunity to improve the process, making it more efficient. Owing to the reduced scale in characteristic dimensions, microstructured reactors offer many clear advantages, such as better temperature control, accelerated heat and mass transfer and enhanced mixing.
Sonication, i.e., the application of ultrasound to process fluids, is an intensification technology that, when applied to crystallization, permits both the process and the product quality to be tailored and improved. The additional degrees of freedom that ultrasound introduces renders the process much more flexible, offering the possibility of improving the crystal characteristics.
This project is a multidisciplinary collaborative effort between the Departments of Chemical and Mechanical Engineering at UCL, involving GSK, a major pharmaceutical company, as industrial partner. Bringing together crystallization, microreactor technology, ultrasound engineering and multiphase flow modeling, this transformative research aims to develop a novel, and more controllable, manufacturing technology for the production of particles of relevance to the pharmaceutical industries with better quality and greater reproducibility. The project will provide a unique training opportunity in the emerging areas of microreaction and sonocrystallization technologies. This project involves three PhD students and one postdoctoral research assistant, working in close collaboration. At present the following PhD position is available.
PhD Studentship
The scope of this research project is the design, fabrication, commissioning and characterization of devices for the cooling crystallization of particles. The researcher will be expected to design and commission microchannel contactors to achieve crystallization under continuous flow conditions. Characterisation will be performed by sophisticated particle size analysis equipment. The project will be in collaboration with a postdoctoral research assistant, a PhD student who, working at the Department of Chemical Engineering, will focus on the modelling of the process, and another PhD student who, working at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, will focus on the ultrasound technology that will be implemented in the flow devices.
Funding Notes:
The studentship, fully funded by EPSRC, is tenable for 3 years and covers tuition fees at the UK/EU rate plus a stipend of £15,590 per annum for eligible residents. Funding is available for home/EU postgraduate students only. The applications will be considered until the position is filled. The deadline for applying is June 1, 2012.
References:
If you are interested, please send your letter of application along with your CV and the names and addresses of two referees to Dr. Luca Mazzei (l.mazzei@ucl.ac.uk) or to Prof. Asterios Gavriilidis (a.gavriilidis@ucl.ac.uk) to whom Informal inquiries can also be addressed.
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008 Results