Our research

The Institute for Mechanical, Process and Energy Engineering has a research community of over 20 academics and 70 postgraduate and research staff.  Our staff perform high quality research utilising our extensive laboratory and workshop facilities.  

Research Groups

The three main research groups in the Institute work across a range of domains in conjunction with many other Heriot-Watt Schools/Institutes, companies and academic organisations.

Design and Manufacture addresses critical manufacturing and healthcare research issues covering the whole product life cycle from conceptualisation, analysis, testing and prototyping through to manufacture, delivery and recycling.

Chemical and Process Engineering provides an important link around the core sciences, studying the development of materials to enable large scale production implementation as well as investigating novel alternative processes for converting co-products into higher value materials.

Energy research focuses around renewable energy, two-phase flow, thermal sciences and carbon capture and storage as well as cross-disciplinary activities exploiting boiling and condensation, fluid and computational modelling.

Other research initiatives

The institute also supports several high profile research initiatives, and we have staff working on the Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation, the internationally leading Heriot-Watt Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre, the James Watt Institute for High Value Manufacturing and our highly successful Edinburgh Research Partnership and engineering and mathematics with the University of Edinburgh.