معرفی
Professor Phil Longhurst is a faculty member at Cranfield University, holding the Chair of Environment and Energy Technology in the School of Water, Energy & Environment. He leads the Centre for Renewable and Low Carbon Energy and serves as Director of Partnerships, bridging academia with industry and government clients. His academic background includes a PhD in Innovation & Technology Assessment, a degree in Design and Technology, and a B.Ed. (Hons). Prior to academia, he worked in the furniture industry and trained as a Design and Technology educator, developing educational wind tunnel demonstrators.
His research focuses on waste management innovation, including material recovery from waste streams, energy-from-waste applications, and pollution prevention. Key projects involve risk assessments for agricultural use of composts (PAS100) and anaerobic digestates (PAS110), trace metal recovery from contaminated land, and systems modeling for waste minimization and net-zero transitions. He has pioneered methods like mechanical-biological treatment (MBT) of solid waste and solid recovered fuels (SRF) quality analysis.
Professor Longhurst collaborates with major institutions such as EPSRC, NERC, Defra, BEIS, and industrial partners like Viridor, Biffa, Boeing. He teaches in Energy, Environment, and Agrifood themes while supervising doctoral researchers. Recent work includes contributions to HM Treasury’s Infrastructure study via the Engineering Interdependencies Expert Group (EIEG) and developing short courses on biowaste regulation and odour control.
His research emphasizes cross-sector collaboration, environmental policy implementation, and transitioning energy systems to net-zero. Clients span government departments (e.g., HM Treasury, UK Water Industry Research), NGOs, and commercial sponsors. Phil has also evaluated methane diffusion dynamics in coal gasification and pioneered neural network-based approaches for solar PV adoption modeling.
