Undertaking an industry placement at Novelis in Göttingen

Olivia Broadbent-Clark completed a placement with her industrial sponsor, Novelis, at their research and development facility in Göttingen, Germany. She was able to meet with her industrial supervisor in person, develop a greater understanding of how industry based research operates and ran her own experiments. As an added bonus, she also got to explore the city and the local Christmas markets with Novelis colleagues, and even got to meet the Göttingen Santa.

During Olivia’s two-week placement at Novelis, she developed her understanding of Industrial settings, a welcome addition to her existing academic research engineer experience. She could compare industry and academic workplaces giving tangible insight valuable for her future career choices. She found industry to be faster paced with a stronger sense of teamwork.

Olivia had the opportunity to view the plant and witness production on a large scale, something unobtainable in academic settings. She worked closely with members of Novelis team, and learnt from their years of experience in their role. This was particularly interesting for areas such as material preparation, ensuring she can take this knowledge back to her research environments and apply the same or similar techniques with tips to get the best finish from her material. Learning more about Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) techniques was also a big help; having an expert level of guidance and observation.

Industrial placements are a key part of the CDT PhD programme, it enables the student to gain a real-world view of the industrial impact of their project and get a direct experience of production processes and scale. As part of her placement in the Novelis Göttingen Research and Development center, co-located at our plant facility, Olivia worked directly with our R&D experts, learnt what it is to be part of an industrial R&D team and created a network to support her throughout her project. It was also the opportunity to focus on particular aspects of her PhD project for the rapid quantification of secondary phases using established internal procedures with SEM/EDX and DSC methods. This part will also be key for her project aiming to investigate new alloys with improved recycled content for the beverage packaging industry.

Nicholas Kamp

R&D Manager NE Specialities, Novelis

Being an active member in team meetings and part of workplace discussions gave an added insight to how Novelis operate. This further developed Olivia’s understanding of how her project fits into the wider scope, and brought into consideration new topics, such as the marketing side of aluminium. This demonstrated the direct impact it might have on other projects and the continuing contribution to improving recycling; a real motivation to continue to produce high levels of research.

Biography

Olivia is a current PhD student at The University of Manchester sponsored by Novelis. Her research project focuses on improving the tolerance of aluminium alloys to impurities and understanding the relationships between recycled content, process conditions, microstructure and performance. The aim of this research is to develop processing conditions that are optimized for alloys with high impurity levels and therefore tolerant of highly recycled content, providing potential impacts for the wide range of industries which rely on these metals and their long-term sustainability.