项目介绍

2026年10月3日

Can electricity replace acids, bases, and cleaning chemicals used throughout industry today? How do local pH conditions develop near electrodes and membranes in electrochemical systems, and how can they be controlled? In this PhD project, you will investigate these questions by combining modelling and experimental data to develop electrically driven alternatives for industrial cleaning and separation processes.

What will you do?
Many industries rely on acids, bases, detergents, and other chemicals to clean equipment, recover valuable products, and produce high-quality process water. These chemicals increase environmental impact, complicate water re-use and require downstream treatment. In this project, we take a different approach: rather than adding chemicals, we aim to create the required chemical conditions directly using electricity.

A key challenge in replacing these chemicals with electricity is that electrochemical systems create localized pH environments near electrodes and membranes. These local conditions often differ strongly from bulk solution properties, yet they determine chemical speciation, surface interactions, selectivity, cleaning efficiency, and fouling behavior. The aim of this PhD project is to understand, predict, and engineer these local pH environments in electrochemical systems.

As a PhD candidate, you will investigate how local pH environments develop near electrodes and membranes in complex water matrices. You will integrate theory, modelling, and experiments to determine how local pH conditions develop, how they depend on water composition and material properties, and how they can be engineered for practical applications. The insights obtained in this project can be used to develop electrically driven, chemical-free technologies for industrial cleaning and separations.

You will be part of the Electrically-driven Chemical-free Operations (ECO) consortium, a collaboration between the Institute for Sustainable Process Technology, the University of Twente, TU Delft, the University of Groningen, the University of Copenhagen, Wageningen University & Research, and industrial partners from the food, chemical, paper, and water sectors.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• investigate how electrically induced local pH environments develop in electrochemical systems;
• develop theoretical and computational models to predict local pH conditions in complex water matrices and investigate the impact of water composition, electrode materials, and membrane materials on pH conditions;
• design experiments to quantify local pH environments near electrodes and membranes and integrate experimental observations and modelling results to develop design principles for electrically driven processes;
• use the obtained insights to guide the design of electrochemical cleaning and separation technologies in close collaboration with the industrial partners in the consortium;
• present research results at consortium meetings, international conferences, and scientific workshops and publish findings in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals.

You will work here
The research is embedded within the Environmental Technology group. You will join the Electrified Interfaces group, a research group studying transport, reactions, and selectivity at charged interfaces in environmental technologies, including electrochemical systems, membrane processes, adsorption and ion-exchange materials. You will be supervised by Dr. Jouke Dykstra and Dr. Hanieh Bazyar from TU Delft.