Open Postdoctoral position in experiments and CFD on evaporation at PoreLab NTNU

About the job

The postdoctoral fellowship position is a temporary position where the main goal is to qualify for work in senior academic positions. The period of employment of this position is 4 years. The position will be in the Thermodynamics group at the Department of Chemistry at NTNU.

The PostDoc will be part of the ERC project Interlab, “Unravelling the fundamentals of transport across the vapor-liquid interface”. Transport of energy and particles across vapor-liquid interfaces is central for growth of rain drops in the atmosphere, evaporation from lakes, distillation columns, development of micro/nano-fluidic devices and much more. The objective of InterLab is to develop theory and methods to reproduce evaporation rates from steady-state experiments with water and octane within an accuracy of 10%. To reach its objectives, InterLab must fill major knowledge gaps in the fundamental understanding of transport across vapor-liquid interfaces.

The PostDocoral fellow will be involved in designing two experimental facilities for this purpose, perform steady-state evaporation experiments, where some also include Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and compare the experimental results to calculations from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) that include the details of the interfacial transport.

If InterLab is successful, we believe that the project can lead to a paradigm shift in the prediction of evaporation and condensation rates, of relevance to a multitude of practical examples.

Your immediate leader is Prof. Øivind Wilhelmsen, who is also the Principal Investigator (PI) of the ERC grant.

Duties of the position

  • Design two experimental facilities together with the PI for water and octane, similar to the rigs presented by Kazemi et al. , equipped to measure properties with very high accuracy.
  • Perform experiments to investigate evaporation, also including PIV.
  • Develop a CFD model of the system that includes the detailed interfacial phenomena, where a theory for the interfacial details will be developed by other colleagues in the ERC project.
  • Compare the experimental results to a CFD model that also included details about the evaporation process from the interfacial scale.
  • Write academic papers and submit them to international scientific journals.
  • Participate in international scientific conferences.

Required selection criteria

  • You must have completed a Norwegian doctoral degree or corresponding foreign doctoral degree recognized as equivalent to a Norwegian PhD. If you can document that the PhD thesis has been submitted, your application can be assessed even if you have not yet defended your dissertation.
  • Excellent oral and written English.

The appointment is to be made in accordance with Regulations on terms of employment for positions such as postdoctoral fellow, Ph.D Candidate, research assistant and specialist candidate.

Preferred selection criteria

  • Have experience from designing experimental rigs.
  • Have experience from carrying out experiments.
  • Have experience with PIV measurements.
  • Have knowledge on and experience with performing CFD simulations.