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Dr Max Besenhard
Lecturer in Digital Manufacturing of Advanced Materials
Dept of Chemical Engineering
Faculty of Engineering Science
- Joined UCL
- 1st Sep 2021
Research summary
Maximilian is a Lecturer for Digital Manufacturing of Advanced Materials in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UCL and programme lead of the newly established Digital Manufacturing MSc. He has an interdisciplinary experimental and computational research background with a strong focus on material science and pharmaceutical process development. He spent several years in industry at SIEMENS and the RCPE GmbH’s simulation working on CFD, population balance modelling, statistical process control and machine learning, and flow sheet modelling for computational scale-up and process development. His industrial and academic work has always combined experimental and computational work covering multiple areas including process scale-up, particle feeding, bioprocesses, flow chemistry, nanomaterials, as well as crystallisation and chromatography. His expertise in process analytical and sensor technology, material science and reactor design, provides the background required for sensible validation and fit for purpose testing of computational approaches.
The new area of digital manufacturing imposes research challenges at several frontiers which are the focus of his current research. Examples are i) Hybrid models for Artificially Intelligent systems combining mechanistic models where possible with machine learning strategies where not, ii) autonomous material discovery and process optimisation, iii) system engineering approaches to manufacture precisely engineered functional materials at small and large scales, iv) novel reactor designs facilitating novel synthetic procedures which yield novel (nano) materials.