Postdoctoral Researcher – Experimentalist on Pneumatic conveying of powders

As postdoctoral researcher, you will be at the heart of our missions in education, research, and innovation, assigned to the SPIN Research Center. Within this centre, you will combine your passion for fundamental science and industrial problematics.

SPIN Research Center is one of the five research center at Mines Saint-Etienne and is dedicated to chemical and process engineering with approximately 80 researchers and professors, postdocs, PhD students and interns, and is supported by administrative and technical staff. The research activities of the SPIN center spread over Natural and Industrial Processes through two CNRS joint-units : Georges Friedel Laboratory (UMR 5307) and the Environment City Society (UMR 5600 “Environnement Ville et Société”). You willl develop your research within the team “Granular Matter Handling and Processing” (PMMG = Procédés de Manipulation de la Matière Granulaire) focusing on the experimental and numerical study of granular matter trough multidiscinlinary approaches such as geometrical and morphological characterization, inorganic chemistry and phyics of complex fluids. The research topics addressed emerge from the collaborations with other research groups in Europe and beyond, as well as with industrial partners.

Granular matter is a specific state of the solid matter whose behaviour is partially described by established laws used for liquid or solids. A large fraction of manufactured materials requires solid particles handling (powders, agglomerates, pellets, tablets, etc.). Due to the large numbers of involved particles the divided solids dynamics is complex . In the particular case of solid particles conveying, the pneumatic transport provides a case with particularly rich interactions between transported particles and confining pipe walls. Beyond the mechanical rebound, solid particles experience erosion or fracturing, changing their morphologies, electrical charges exchange modifying the further transport, local thermodynamics condition changes upon impact affecting cohesivity of the particles. In some cases, these chemo-physical interactions lead to deposit formation along the confining pipes, potentially affecting the conveying efficiency.

The expected work will be to develop an experimental setup able to study the various interactions existing in a model pneumatic conevying system in order to identify the mechanisms responsible for deposit formation. Thanks to the measurements of physical quantities such as flow rate, pressure drop, electrical charges, as well as from image analysis of video captures obtained with various powders and geometrical tubing configurations, the conditions leading to deposit formation will be established. The analysis and interpretation of the responsible mechanisms will be developed based on previous studies available in the literature. The supervision team will consist in researchers from the SPIN center, assisted by research engineers from our partner ORANO.