Secondment Archives

The Royal Mint’s Journey in Electronic Waste Management

TransFIRe researcher, Dr Masoud Ahmadinia, has recently finished a project working with The Royal Mint on their innovative initiative to extract precious metals from the circuit boards of electronic waste, such as laptops and mobile phones, in order to create an eco-friendly jewellery line. The Royal Mint is working in collaboration with Excir, a Canadian clean tech start-up, to use their patented technology, based on revolutionary chemistry and aims to leverage advanced technologies and innovative methodologies to enhance the extraction process. As part of a secondment, Dr Ahmadinia spent a number of days embedded within The Royal Mint, after which, a range of documentation and analysis was produced. These included a Sankey diagram, visually representing the material and energy flow of the processes involved in order to understand their efficiency and identify potential opportunities, as well as a comprehensive cost analysis report for the energy use of processes. As [...]

Embedding TransFIRe within industry

Secondments are a brilliant way of offering professional benefits to both companies and employees, in our case researchers, alike. For industry, it can be an opportunity to bring someone new into their company, with a fresh set of eyes and skills, that has the potential to help develop a new area of business or solve a particular problem and to help build collaboration. For secondees, it’s an opportunity to immerse themselves in the fabric of a company, help bring their expertise to the table and broaden their skills and knowledge. In light of this, it has been really important and worthwhile for TransFIRe to have a number of secondment placements set up for our research staff for a range of Foundation Industry companies. These placements focus on short term projects or challenges that are of benefit to both the companies and to the TransFIRe researchers. For example, this month [...]