KTP Associate

The candidate must be passionate about energy transition, decarbonisation and the environment. They must have not only the requisite knowledge in thermodynamics, heat transfer and energy modelling, but also practical industry experience of team working and project management to carry through the developed plans.

Ideally already working in this field, the candidate must have ambition to use and share their knowledge to support a career in decarbonisation.

The Associate is expected to become an absolute expert on the latest technologies and practices in decarbonising heating at large scale as well as become familiar with locally relevant/viable technologies and not just historical ‘industry standard’ solutions.

The two JLR sites at Whitley and Gaydon have been in use for decades and contain a mixture of age of facilities and equipment. The Associate needs to evaluate the current metering and data fidelity and advise on additional requirements for collecting all needed data. Assisted by the JLR team, the Associate will collect from various sources the required technical info and drawings or arrange for new surveys or drawings.

The Associate must have experience of energy modelling for the digital twin development, plus a working knowledge of thermodynamics and heat transfer. They must also have relevant experience in thermal systems design, installation and commissioning.

As the Associate will be working in a large corporate entity and will interact with a range of different teams in JLR, good stakeholder engagement is required.

The Associate will be employed on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project between the University of Warwick and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) Ltd. The 34-month project will create digital twin energy models of the JLR Gaydon and Whitley sites and produce a roadmap for decarbonisation. The project will predominantly focus on thermal energy decarbonisation through waste heat recovery, heat networks, thermal storage and heat pumps.

The Associate will primarily work alongside JLR engineers to create the digital twin models and roadmaps and fully embed energy modelling into JLR’s planning processes. Based in JLR’s Engineering Operations team, they will develop digital twin energy models of their two main vehicle engineering and testing sites, produce roadmaps for decarbonisation, embed energy planning within business processes and begin pilot-scale implementation of the plans.

The Associate will also maintain a desk in the University of Warwick’s Sustainable Thermal Energy Technologies (STET) group, where they will have access to state-of-the-art knowledge in thermal energy decarbonisation from the academic team there and assistance with the digital twin modelling.

This post is part of the KTP initiative funded by Innovate UK. Knowledge Transfer Partnerships is a UK-wide programme that has been helping businesses for the past 40 years to improve their competitiveness and productivity through the better use of knowledge, technology and skills that reside within the UK Knowledge Base. It is an exciting opportunity to work across industry and academia to address one of the most demanding and important challenges facing the UK – thermal energy decarbonisation..

The skills the candidate will develop will put them at the cutting edge of thermal energy decarbonisation – skills that will be invaluable to any business and in extremely high demand. They will collaborate with a dynamic team of JLR staff and University of Warwick academics to embed state-of-the-art thermal energy systems knowledge across the organisation’s operations and partnerships. This will be achieved through staff training, collaborative working, and the development of impactful resources.