INTERNSHIP POSITION 2026 : capillary evaporator (Mines Saint-Etienne and ORANO) - 6 months

Joining Mines Saint-Étienne means committing to an institution where science and innovation build a more sustainable future. It is a school of excellence where everyone has the opportunity to unlock their full potential and contribute to tackling the challenges of tomorrow.

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The Institut Mines-Télécom brings together France’s leading Grandes Ecoles to tackle major industrial, digital, energy, and environmental challenges. With its eight public Grandes Écoles and two affiliated Graduate Schools, it is the leading public institute dedicated to engineers and managers. Together, we imagine and build a sustainable future by educating the leaders who will shape tomorrow’s transitions.

🎯 Job description

The separation of two compounds is a fundamental process for many industrial sectors. In this project, we focus on evaporators. In a society with increasingly constrained costs and access to energy, reducing the consumption of energy-intensive technologies becomes crucial. The objective of this internship is to evaluate a new evaporator concept inspired by the evapo-transpiration of trees1-4 which makes use of capillary forces to accelerate evaporation rates, thus improving separation and drastically reducing energy costs. Such an evaporator is a complex multi-scale system which involves both thermodynamics of phase changes and capillarity. This experimentally-oriented internship will be based at Mines Saint-Etienne (in collaboration with ORANO) and will allow the student to improve an existing test bench, acquire data and interpret the obtained results. During the internship, many physical parameters such as temperature, pressure, geometry and size of capillaries, can be explored. The student with a solid background in liquid physics and thermodynamics of phase changes will consolidate these areas of expertise during this internship. Depending on the results and on the student's motivation, a PhD thesis involving ORANO could be considered following this internship.

1- Eyegheleme, N. L., Peng, K., & Boreyko, J. B. (2022). Modeling transpiration in synthetic trees. International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 183, 122121.

2- Shi, W., Dalrymple, R. M., McKenny, C. J., Morrow, D. S., Rashed, Z. T., Surinach, D. A., & Boreyko, J. B. (2020). Passive water ascent in a tall, scalable synthetic tree. Scientific reports, 10(1), 230.

3- Eyegheleme, N. L., Shi, W., De Koninck, L. H., O'Brien, J. L., & Boreyko, J. B. (2021). Synthetic trees for enhanced solar evaporation and water harvesting. Applied Physics Letters, 118(25).

4- Cornish, G. A., Eyegheleme, N. L., Hudson, L. S., Troy, K. J., Vollen, M. M., & Boreyko, J. B. (2022). Transpiration-powered desalination water bottle. Soft Matter, 18(6), 1287-1293.

🔍 What we are looking for

You hold a:

· Student attending mechanical or chemical engineering MSc diploma or similar

Your additional strengths:

· Motivated student eager to learn

· Student with knowledge on fundamentals of fluid mechanics and transport phenomena

· English skills