PhD in Hydrogen Production via Catalytic Cracking of Ammonia

at  Universit du Luxembourg

The University of Luxembourg is an international research university with a distinctly multilingual and interdisciplinary character.
The Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine (FSTM) at the University of Luxembourg contributes multidisciplinary expertise in the fields of Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, Computer Science, Life Sciences and Medicine.
Through its dual mission of teaching and research, the FSTM seeks to generate and disseminate knowledge and train new generations of responsible citizens in order to better understand, explain and advance society and environment we live in.

With the growing concern regarding the impact of the climate change to the human beings, there is a pressing need to accelerate the transformation towards a green economy. In Europe in particular, one can look in the case of the European Green Deal which was approved in 2020. In the agreement, the European Commission has agreed on a set of policies to make European Union (EU) to be climate neutral in 2050. In this respect, an ambitious plan to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions as much as 55% by 2030 will be one of the top priorities. Therefore, one of the main strategies to fulfil this objective is through the utilisation of clean energy including hydrogen as one of the promising and cleanest energy carriers. As a young university that continuously supports this transformation to secure the future of the current generations, the University of Luxembourg has been recently endowed to establish a new Paul Wurth Chair research group in 2022 focusing whose research thrust focuses in the field of hydrogen.
One of the main research agendas in the Paul Wurth Chair is then to focus in the continuous improvement of the current hydrogen production processes. For example, one of the current research focuses of the research group is the investigation of the hydrogen production through ammonia cracking. Therefore, in order to achieve this objective, the research group has recently acquired a new, state-of-the-art reactor system that is in tandem with a dedicated gas chromatograph for a continuous monitoring of the hydrogen production. In this PhD position, you will then be mostly working with the reactor. In particular, your research will be focused on developing various promising catalysts that could improve the hydrogen production processes. Thus, there are a number of research objectives that will be fulfilled by this project such as (i) investigation of the new and potential catalyst active sites (e.g. non noble-metal catalyst) and catalyst supports by testing them using our new reactor, (ii) understanding the structure-performance relationship between the catalyst and its support layer, (iii) elucidation of the reaction mechanisms involved in the hydrogen production and (iv) understanding the catalyst deactivation phenomenon and the strategies to address this issue. Moreover, even though the current research project focuses on the ammonia cracking, there is also a possibility during the duration of the project to widen the research agenda. In this case, you might then also be expected to identify and develop other promising catalysts that can be used for other hydrogen production processes (e.g. biogas reforming) and investigate them in our newly acquired reactor.