PhD project within the Industrial Doctoral School at Umeå University.
As part of the overall goal of significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions from cement and quicklime production, the PhD project is aimed towards studies on how different process setups influence phase transformations and the behavior of trace elements. The project is based on experimental studies and thermodynamic equilibrium calculations, and, when possible, validation against industrial process data.
This project contributes to the transformation of two essential industrial sectors, cement and quicklime production, towards a sustainable future, with some of the results expected to also be applicable in other industrial sectors.
Cement and quicklime production together account for more than 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions. When integrated into a Carbon Capture and Storage/Utilization framework, electrified production processes hold the potential to achieve near-zero carbon dioxide emissions. The aim of the project is to generate new knowledge related to the occurrence and reaction pathways of trace elements in cement and quicklime production, as well as how the development of crystalline phases is affected by future process concepts. Such insights are crucial, as technological development will likely involve new heat sources and higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the process gases, which can be expected to influence the entire process chemistry.
The doctoral student is part of the research environment of the Centre of Sustainable Cement and Quicklime Production and the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics. The Centre collaborates closely with the research group Thermochemical Energy Conversion laboratory (TEC-lab), with access to its own and shared research infrastructures such as the Umeå Centre for Electron Microscopy (UCEM) and Multi-purpose Adaptive X-ray Scattering platform (MAXS).
This project is performed in close collaboration with Heidelberg Materials Cement Sverige AB, the sole producer of cement clinker in Sweden.
