Per Ivar Einejord Friborg joined PoreLab at the department of Physics, NTNU in Trondheim, on September 15th, 2026, as a PhD candidate for 3 years. Per Ivar holds a master in Chemical Processes Technology from NTNU.
His position is financed by DYNCAT, a FRIPRO project financed by the Research Council of Norway (see PoreLab annual report 2025 page 71).
His supervisor is Associate Professor Raffaela Cabriolu (NTNU) and his co-supervisors are Francesca Lønstad Bleken (SINTEF Industry) and Seyed Mehdi Vaez Allaei (NTNU)
Per Ivar introduces his project as follow: “Silicones are made from dimethyldichlorosilane, which industry produces by reacting methyl chloride with silicon over a copper catalyst. The process has run since the 1940s, but how the copper–silicon mixture actually catalyses the reaction is still not understood. Much of what is known is scattered across decades of experimental and computational studies that use different terminology. In my PhD, I build a text mining workflow to automatically extract catalytic data from this literature into a curated database, which I then analyse with unsupervised machine learning. In parallel, I develop kinetic Monte Carlo models of the reactions on the Cu–Si surface. These simulate the individual reaction events one by one, so that energies from first-principles calculations can be carried up to reaction rates under industrially relevant conditions.”