As Austria's largest research and technology organisation for applied research, we are dedicated to make substantial contribution to solving the major challenges of our time, climate change and digitalisation. To achieve our goals, we rely on our specific research, development and technology competencies, which are the basis of our commitment to excellence in all areas. With our open culture of innovation and our motivated, international teams, we are working to position AIT as Austria's leading research institution at the highest international level and to make a positive contribution to the economy and society.

Our Center for Energy located in Vienna invites applications for a PhD Thesis position. At the Center for Energy , we develop sustainable solutions for the energy system of the future, taking into account technological, regulatory and economic requirements. Our portfolio of topics focuses on three key systems: cities and the built environment, public energy supply systems, and industrial energy systems.

The PhD project focuses on innovative cooling solutions for high-power data centers and high-performance electronic systems .As current server and data center infrastructures primarily rely on air-based cooling systems, they increasingly reach their thermal limits due to rapidly rising power densities in modern CPUs and GPUs. Liquid cooling technologies, such as Direct-to-Chip (D2C) can dissipate higher heat loads from HPC and AI data centers but still require additional air-cooling support for other components, to ensure the efficiency of these systems.

To overcome these limitations, the PhD project will investigate immersion cooling in general, with the main focus on waste-heat upgrade via two-phase immersion cooling (2PIC) , where the fluid boils directly on the chip surface and enables highly efficient heat removal. By combining 2PIC with an integrated heat pump, the project will explore how the resulting waste heat can be upgraded and reused as a valuable energy resource and important contribution to enable sustainable data centers and highly efficient electronic systems.

Your responsibilities:

• You will perform a thorough literature review on immersion cooling technologies and waste-heat utilization by heat integration within thermal networks to establish the state of the art and identify technological and operational challenges.
• You will model and conduct dynamic system simulations of full cooling systems (e.g. in Dymola)
• You will conduct experimental investigations focusing on the integration of active cooling, cooling aggregates and heat pumps systems to develop control strategies and test operation windows under different load conditions.
• You will perform techno-economic and feasibility analyses .
• You will contribute to the development of standards and interfaces for integrating immersion cooling into data centers and energy system infrastructures.
• By working closely with industrial and scientific partners, you will gain valuable experience and develop expertise in energy-efficient cooling and waste-heat utilisation for high-performance electronics .
• Your research will also strengthen AIT’s technological expertise, innovation, and industry impact in this field.
• You will engage in scientific planning, and you will publish your findings in international journals and present them at conferences.

Your qualifications as an Ingenious Partner:

• Completed master’s studies or you are close to complete them in Thermal Engineering, Sustainable Energy Systems, Mechanical Engineering, Process Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics or a related technical field
• Good competence in Modelling and Simulation (Dymola/Modelica, gPROMS, AVEVA PS, or similar)
• Good competence in programming (Python)
• Good competence in experimental work (design, evaluation)
• High commitment and ability to work in a team as well as willingness to collaborate with industrial and scientific partners
• Interested in reading and writing scientific publications and enjoy application-oriented questions from industry
• Very good command of English (spoken and written), good German knowledge preferred.

Details:

• Duration of the PhD project: 3 years
• Start date: ideally 01.04.2026 (or even earlier)
• To obtain the PhD degree, you will have to enroll to our partner university TU Wien . You will be supervised by an academic supervisor from TU Wien, Institute of Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer as well as by a supervisor and advisor from AIT.

What to expect:

• EUR 2.786,10 gross per month (14 times / year) for 30 h / week.
• In addition to numerous events, seminars, networking opportunities, flexible working conditions (including home-office possibilities) and additional company benefits, you will be part of our AIT PhD community with around 150 international students.

TOMORROW TODAY - WITH YOU?

At AIT diversity and inclusion are of great importance. This is why we strive to inspire women to join our teams in the field of technology. We welcome applications from women, who will be given preference in case of equal qualifications after taking into account all relevant facts and circumstances of all applications.

Please submit your application documents including your CV, cover letter and certificates online.