About the project
Liquid hydrogen (LH2) storage and transport enables flexible exploitation of potentially carbon-free energy. In this fully-funded PhD project, you will tackle outstanding fluid-dynamic challenges in cryogenic engineering and contribute to a techno-economic assessment of liquid hydrogen technologies that is needed urgently to inform major infrastructure and technology investments.
You will receive training from and work alongside world-leading academics at the University of Southampton who are leaders in aerospace and maritime engineering science. You will have access to the University’s extensive fluid dynamics laboratories in order to apply advanced experimental approaches, as well as use of the University’s powerful supercomputer Iridis 5 for flow simulation. This project is of significant interest to international businesses, and your work will benefit from privileged access to their data and through collaboration with industrial leaders. The University of Southampton is a member of the UK’s Russell Group of world-class research-intensive universities and ranked in the world’s top 100 Universities.
Storage and transport of liquid hydrogen poses particular challenges because hydrogen boils at minus 253 Celsius. Carriage of liquid hydrogen in zero-emission aircraft and in hydrogen carrier ships requires minimisation and management of hydrogen boil-off. This motivates experimental investigation and computational modelling of the heating effects of the liquid sloshing in the moving tank. The fundamental fluid dynamic investigations in this project will feed into a techno-economic analysis of a range of technologies and strategies for managing boil-off as part of a multi-disciplinary activity funded by the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute, in collaboration with the University’s Business School.
