PhD studentship: Atmospheric Water Harvesting: From Material Development to Device Integration

About the Project

The Department of Chemical Engineering at University College London (UCL) is one of the leading departments in the UK, with an international reputation for research excellence and impact. Research in the department spans molecular-scale phenomena through to device and process systems engineering, with a strong focus on addressing global challenges in health, sustainability, and advanced technologies.

The Department is seeking a highly motivated PhD student to work on the development of next-generation materials and devices for water harvesting from air. The project will focus on the design and testing of advanced sorbent materials and structured devices capable of capturing water vapour from ambient air, with the aim of enabling practical, energy-efficient atmospheric water harvesting technologies.

The studentship is fully funded for 4 years, starting in October 2026, or later.

Studentship description

Access to clean freshwater is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, affecting billions of people worldwide. With climate change intensifying arid conditions across vast regions, there is a growing need for decentralized, low-energy technologies capable of producing water independently of rivers, lakes, or infrastructure. The atmosphere holds an estimated 13,000 trillion litres of water at any given time, a resource available everywhere and accessible without large-scale civil engineering.

Recent advances in porous materials, including metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), porous polymers, and hybrid sorbent systems, have demonstrated unprecedented water uptake capacities and regeneration efficiencies, creating new opportunities for sustainable water production. The discovery of MOFs earned Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Yaghi's own research including the use of these materials to harvest water from air. Yet a fundamental gap remains between material-level performance and device-level water production, that this project aims to close.

This PhD project will investigate new water-adsorbing materials, together with the design, fabrication, and testing of renewables integrated device concepts for atmospheric water harvesting. The research will combine materials synthesis and characterization with transport phenomena, heat and mass transfer analysis, modelling, device engineering, and performance testing under realistic operating conditions.

The student will be supervised by Dr Marco Gigantino and Dr Peyman Z. Moghadam (second supervisor).