Donald Ntamo Developing an Advanced Digital Twin for a Pharmaceutical Pilot Plant
2021 - Present
Contact: Sir Robert Hadfield Building, Mappin St, Sheffield, S1 3JD +44 (0)114 222 7567 dntamo1@sheffield.ac.uk
Biography I completed a Master of Engineering degree (Meng) in Chemical Engineering from The University of Manchester, United Kingdom, with first-class honours in 2020 as a Top Achiever Botswana Government scholarship recipient. My Meng dissertation was focused on evaluating the performance of ammonia sensing field organic transistors in wastewater headspace. It was experiment-based research that involved sensor fabrication and characterisation and was supervised by Professor Krishna Persaud.
After finishing my undergraduate, I worked at Kgalagadi Breweries Limited for 4 months as a graduate engineer in the packaging department. During the internship at Kgalagadi brewery, I applied engineering skills of problem-solving and troubleshooting to identify inefficiencies in the brewery and to optimise plant performance. My project at Kgalagadi Breweries Limited was focused on steam usage reduction.
Research My research focus is developing a digital twin for a pharmaceutical tableting pilot plant at the University of Sheffield called diamond integrated pilot plant (DiPP). The digital twin of the DiPP will be constructed by integrating an advanced mechanistic model, advanced control system and cloud technologies. I am supervised by Professor Mo Zandi, Dr Peyman Z. Moghadam and Dr Payam Soulatiantork.
My research will use a system engineering approach to integrate key powder process steps for formulated products such as crystallisation, bending, granulation and tableting and optimise them using IoT technologies. The research will provide a solution that could use all the data in real-time and can use integrated mechanistic models to predict and control critical process variables.