QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for Honours, Masters and PhD study. Search to find a topic that interests you or propose your own research topic to a prospective QUT supervisor. You may also ask a prospective supervisor to help you identify or refine a research topic.
Found 56 matching student topics
Displaying 13–24 of 56 results
Optimising landfill leachate treatment with innovative bioreactors
Landfill leachate, a highly polluted liquid, can pose serious risks to the environment and public health if not treated effectively. Without proper management, it can contaminate groundwater and surface water, threatening ecosystems and water resources.This project focuses on using innovative bioreactors to treat landfill leachate efficiently and sustainably. By optimizing these reactors, we aim to remove harmful pollutants like ammonia, addressing a key challenge in managing high-strength wastewater. Your work will contribute to practical solutions for real-world environmental problems.
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Transforming wastewater treatment with anaerobic granular sludge technology
Are you interested in solving real-world environmental challenges? Wastewater treatment is essential for protecting the environment, and anaerobic granular sludge technology is at the forefront of creating sustainable solutions. Think of it as using natural microorganisms to clean water in an energy-efficient way, while also recovering valuable resources like nutrients and energy.In this project, you’ll dive into how anaerobic granular sludge works - tiny but powerful clusters of microbes that improve wastewater treatment by breaking down pollutants. This cutting-edge technology …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Scene Understanding for Underwater Imagery
Underwater ecosystems, including coral reefs and seagrass meadows, play a critical role in maintaining marine biodiversity, providing coastal protection, and supporting fisheries and tourism economies that millions depend upon globally. These habitats are increasingly vulnerable to climate change, pollution, and other anthropogenic impacts, demanding urgent efforts to monitor and restore them. Accurate scene understanding of underwater imagery enables fine-scale ecosystem monitoring across spatial and temporal scales, supporting essential activities such as habitat and biodiversity assessment, validation of aerial and remotely …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Robotics
Application of fluorescence-activated cell sorting and confocal microscopy for the study of the microbial communities responsible for nutrient removal from domestic wastewater
The removal of nutrients like carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater is critical to the prevention of eutrophication in receiving water systems and is carried out by complex microbial communities.Eutrophication can have devastating consequences on aquatic life and natural ecosystems, with toxic algal blooms also posing a risk to human health.Understanding the microbiology of phosphorus (P) removal from wastewater is considered essential to knowledge-based optimisation of enhanced biological P removal (EBPR) systems.Most of the species in these systems are novel …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for Microbiome Research
Weakly nonlinear water waves in the complex plane
Weakly nonlinear waves are described by dispersive pdes, such as the famous Korteweg–De Vries (KdV) equation. These models have applications to a variety of phenomena in physics, including the propagation of water waves, but they are also interesting from a mathematical perspective because they can have special properties.While the KdV equation and its variants are well-studied in the literature, a new approach is to attempt to learn about wave propagation by investigating solution behaviour in complex plane. For example, there …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
Understanding cellular-spatial interplay between osteocyte networks and their environment using bioengineered 3D bone models
Project Reference: #1MPQC-NATP1Preferred Project Start: ImmediateHow do bone-forming cells communicate to build and maintain a functional bone matrix?Osteoblasts produce new bone extracellular matrix, while osteocytes become embedded within this matrix and form an interconnected network that helps regulate bone formation, adaptation and remodelling. Although these cells work closely together in the body, their interactions are difficult to reproduce and investigate using conventional two-dimensional cell culture.Bone-cell behaviour is strongly influenced by the surrounding microenvironment, including its composition, mechanical properties, mineral content, …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Metal halide perovskite solar cell performance based on impurity profiles from Australian sourced precursor materials
Australia has the potential to lead globally in supplying precursor materials for next-generation metal halide perovskite solar cells, leveraging its abundant critical minerals and strong mineral processing capabilities with an innovative "mineral to precursor to final product" strategy.This project will demonstrate the performance of next-generation metal halide perovskite solar cells using Australian sourced materials, complimented with computational modelling to understand the elemental interactions of any impurities.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Recovery of metal halide perovskite precursors from Australia sources
Investigate, model and experiment on the extraction and recovery of cations and anions, used in the synthesis of perovskite solar cells, from Australian resources.Australia has the potential to lead globally in supplying precursor materials for next-generation metal halide perovskite solar cells, leveraging its abundant critical minerals and strong mineral processing capabilities with an innovative 'mineral to precursor to final product' strategy.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Construction materials in extreme chemical and thermal processing environments
Investigate and identify materials that can be used to construct chemical plants using extreme chemicals and processing conditions.Australia has the potential to lead globally in supplying critical minerals for current and emerging energy technologies, however the extraction and recovery of these minerals are requiring more aggressive chemicals and processing requirements that are not suitable for traditionally used construction materials, such as stainless steel.Thus, this project will perform experimental material testing on a range of construction materials under extreme chemically corrosive …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Machine Learning-based pedictive tool for energy storage
The fundamental idea behind the ML approach is to analyze and map the relationships between the physical,chemical, and energy storage properties of materials with their associated output data. This early understanding of the energy storage capabilities through the ML approach helps the material scientists to clearly understand, discover, and optimize the fabrication process to develop highly efficient energy storage systems. It also provides key steps in the device fabrication process omitting excessive experimental stages.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
How do healthy people sleep? Biomechanics, physiology, and environment - what matters most?
In the Westernized world a person typically spends one third of their life in bed, with more time spent sleeping in a bed than in any other single activity. Sleep amount and quality of sleep have a direct impact on mood, behaviour, motor skills and overall quality of life. Yet, despite how important restful sleep is for the body to maintain good health, there is a comparatively small amount of studies evaluating key multi-factorial and biomechanical determinants of restful sleep …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Advanced electron microscopy for sustainable nanocatalysis
The systematic and detailed characterisation of heterogeneous catalysts is critical for design of effective and stable catalytic materials, since it allows one to understand the correlation between their structure and physicochemical properties.Especially, it is important to monitor the structural evolution of catalytic materials and their active sites in a controllable environment and under realistic reaction conditions.Thus, we propose to use a powerful combination of aberration-corrected high-resolution TEM and in situ TEM experiments which allow us to gain extensive knowledge about …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
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