Joining Mines Saint-Étienne means committing to an institution where science and innovation build a more sustainable future. It is a school of excellence where everyone has the opportunity to unlock their full potential and contribute to tackling the challenges of tomorrow.

Ranked among the top engineering schools in France and recognized worldwide, our school, a member of the Institut Mines-Télécom, educates the talents of tomorrow while actively addressing major industrial, digital, and environmental challenges. By joining us, you become part of a community of 500 members of staff, 2,500 students and take part in an ambitious project: combining academic excellence, cutting-edge research, and positive societal impact.

The Institut Mines-Télécom brings together France’s leading Grandes Ecoles to tackle major industrial, digital, energy, and environmental challenges. With its eight public Grandes Écoles and two affiliated Graduate Schools, it is the leading public institute dedicated to engineers and managers. Together, we imagine and build a sustainable future by educating the leaders who will shape tomorrow’s transitions.

🎯 Job description

The separation of two compounds is a fundamental process for many industrial sectors. In this project, we focus on evaporators. In a society with increasingly constrained costs and access to energy, reducing the consumption of energy-intensive technologies becomes crucial. The objective of this internship is to evaluate a new evaporator concept inspired by the evapo-transpiration of trees1-4 which makes use of capillary forces to accelerate evaporation rates, thus improving separation and drastically reducing energy costs. Such an evaporator is a complex multi-scale system which involves both thermodynamics of phase changes and capillarity. This experimentally-oriented internship will be based at Mines Saint-Etienne (in collaboration with ORANO) and will allow the student to improve an existing test bench, acquire data and interpret the obtained results. During the internship, many physical parameters such as temperature, pressure, geometry and size of capillaries, can be explored. The student with a solid background in liquid physics and thermodynamics of phase changes will consolidate these areas of expertise during this internship. Depending on the results and on the student's motivation, a PhD thesis involving ORANO could be considered following this internship.

1-       Eyegheleme, N. L., Peng, K., & Boreyko, J. B. (2022). Modeling transpiration in synthetic trees. International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 183, 122121.

2-       Shi, W., Dalrymple, R. M., McKenny, C. J., Morrow, D. S., Rashed, Z. T., Surinach, D. A., & Boreyko, J. B. (2020). Passive water ascent in a tall, scalable synthetic tree. Scientific reports, 10(1), 230.

3-       Eyegheleme, N. L., Shi, W., De Koninck, L. H., O'Brien, J. L., & Boreyko, J. B. (2021). Synthetic trees for enhanced solar evaporation and water harvesting. Applied Physics Letters, 118(25).

4-       Cornish, G. A., Eyegheleme, N. L., Hudson, L. S., Troy, K. J., Vollen, M. M., & Boreyko, J. B. (2022). Transpiration-powered desalination water bottle. Soft Matter, 18(6), 1287-1293.

🔍 What we are looking for

You hold a:

·         Student (from EU only) attending mechanical or chemical engineering MSc diploma or similar

Your additional strengths:

·         Motivated student eager to learn

·         Student with knowledge on fundamentals of fluid mechanics and transport phenomena

·         English skills

🌍 Why join Mines Saint-Étienne?

We support each of our employees on the path to excellence, with the conviction that together, we can have a lasting and significant impact on our world.

Joining Mines Saint-Etienne is the opportunity to find:

•             A stimulating environment: Cutting-edge experimental resources, a welcoming working environment and a solid international network (T.I.M.E., EULIST).

•             A real impact: Contractual research projects worth €11 million/year, mainly with industrial partners, A science culture centre, La Rotonde, which has been committed to science outreach for 25 years, welcoming over 50,000 visitors per year.

Let's build a more sustainable future, through science, engineering, and projects that make sense.

📩 Apply now!

Application deadline:  31/03/2026 (application will close earlier if a suitable candidate is found)

🔗 Submit your application to our dedicated platform https://institutminestelecom.recruitee.com/o/internship-position-2026-capillary-evaporator-mines-saint-etienne-and-orano-eu-candidates-only-6-months

As part of its Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion policy, the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne is committed to fair treatment of all applicants.

Additional information

·           The positions offered for recruitment are open to all with, on request, facilities for candidates with disabilities

·         Possibility to be enrolled in a Ph.D. Thesis after the intenship

·         All applications may be subject to an administrative investigation

 Contacts

·           For the content of the position:
[Gianluca Lavalle – Associate Professor
Mail : gianluca.lavalle@emse.fr

·           For HR and administrative aspects:

Milica PETKOVIC– Gestionnaire RH

Mail : milica.petkovic@mines-stetienne.fr  
Tel. : + 33 (0)4 77 42 02 08