EnerTherm Engineering is a thermal engineering firm in Peterborough. We take school students on work experience weeks, run paid internships across Cambridgeshire, and host researchers — and everyone leaves with a model or a tool the team still uses.
Same rule at every length: you get given a real problem, and someone senior tells you honestly whether you solved it.
Years 10–13 · via Unifrog
You get a brief on day one and something working by Friday. Past weeks have produced a CAD generator, a tool that reads electrical drawings, and a model of a baking oven. No shadowing from the corner of the room.
Ages 16–21 and career changers · via CPCA Skills
A longer run at a bigger problem: a plant model, a calculator, a data pipeline, a piece of the customer platform. You present it at the end to the people who will use it.
PhD researchers and post-docs
Researchers spend months with us rather than days — bringing an academic problem into a working engineering business, and taking industrial practice back into the lab. Heat integration, process modelling and industrial software are where we are most use.
The destinations platform used by 4,000+ schools and colleges. If your school uses it, search us there.
The Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority skills portal — internships, T Levels and work experience across our patch.
One example of the paperwork side: Manchester's Doctoral Academy sets out how a researcher spends part of a PhD working outside the university. Your institution will have an equivalent — we fill in our half of it.
Written down before you start, so you know on day one what finished looks like.
Site visit, safety, and the vocabulary — burners, heat exchangers, dryers. You read a real P&ID until it stops looking like spaghetti.
A scoped piece of work with a named engineer who owns it with you. Success is written down on day one so you know what finished looks like.
Code, model, calculation sheet or drawing — whatever the problem needs. Reviewed weekly by someone who will tell you plainly when it is wrong.
You present to the engineers who will use it, write the documentation, and leave it working. Several of these are still running.
The test we apply to a student project: is anyone still using it a year later?
Maya
Ormiston Bushfield Academy
Maya is building a complete platform for generating internal CPD training material — turning all kinds of documentation into ready-to-use courses.
CPD is continuing professional development: the training engineers keep doing after they qualify. The platform takes documentation we already hold and turns it into courses staff can sit. It is becoming a key engine for the continuous development of our staff, alongside the external training we already invest in.
Kiril
Jack Hunt School
Kiril wrote a CFD solver from scratch — it takes in a CAD geometry, builds its own mesh and solves the flow.
CFD means computational fluid dynamics: predicting how air or liquid moves through and around a part. The code imports geometry from any CAD package as an STL file, meshes the computational domain, then solves the Navier–Stokes equations for momentum and heat. It already runs simple heat transfer cases — heat put in, heat dissipating out. We have taken it in-house to add harder physics (combustion, multi-phase) and to run it on a GPU cluster.
Benjamin
The King's School, Peterborough
We recently hosted Benjamin, an aspiring chemical engineering student, for a practical work placement at EnerTherm Engineering.
During his placement, Benjamin developed a steady-state heat and mass balance model for industrial convective baking ovens.
Nicholas
The King's School, Peterborough
Practical work placements at EnerTherm Engineering focus on systematic problem-solving across different disciplines.
During his time with our team, Nicholas developed a software application to audit commercial contract terms against UK statutory requirements. Engineering projects rely on precise, compliant contracts to manage liability, performance guarantees, and delivery schedules. Nicholas addressed this by designing a database tool to automate the…
Samuel Chamling Rai
The King's School, Peterborough
Samuel Chamling Rai, a student from King's School, recently completed a week-long placement with our engineering team.
He built a software tool to accelerate our R&D workflow. The program translates natural language descriptions or 2D sketches directly into code to generate 3D CAD models. This automation works for both individual components and complex assemblies.
Tawanda
The Peterborough School
We recently had the pleasure of hosting Tawanda, a Year 10 student with a passion for computer science and engineering, for an intensive work experience week at EnerTherm Engineering.
It is always refreshing to see the next generation of engineers tackling complex challenges. During his time with us, Tawanda focused on a fascinating project: building a custom CAD system from the ground up.
Bradley Msimanga
The King's School, Peterborough
What if you could test an industrial fryer before building a single part of it?
That's exactly what Bradley Msimanga set out to do - and he did a phenomenal job. Industrial crisp fryers are deceptively complex. Behind every bag of crisps is a tightly coupled thermal system - frying away tonnes of water per hour, heating and circulating hot oil, burning gas, and recovering energy from the vapours it gives off. Get…
Eva
The King's School, Peterborough
Setting the bar high: A week of innovation with Eva.
Sometimes, a week is all it takes to make a lasting impact. We recently hosted Eva for a week-long placement at EnerTherm Engineering, and she absolutely shone.
Tchip
Greater Peterborough UTC
Huge shoutout to Tchip for an incredible achievement!
It’s not every day you see a student build a fully functioning web app from scratch, but Tchip has done exactly that. He’s created a one-stop tool designed to make posting to Instagram easier and smarter than ever.
Esther Johnson
Greater Peterborough UTC
It's fantastic to host motivated students like Esther Johnson, currently midway through her two-week placement with us!
From building an engaging Sudoku puzzle (Excel/Jupyter) to now developing a practical folder organisation tool, her proactive approach is commendable. We admire her aspiration to become a Full Stack Software Engineer and her collaborative spirit – qualities she also brings to her role on the student council.
Ryan Fisher
Greater Peterborough UTC
Ryan built three of the calculators our engineers reach for: burner efficiency, a heat audit and a pinch analysis tool.
The burner tool returns running efficiency and fuel consumption across different operating conditions — fuel, excess air and the rest — so a change can be costed before anyone touches the plant. The heat audit calculator estimates heat loss from surfaces and flue gas. The third runs a pinch analysis.
Ed
Greater Peterborough UTC
Ed built the design of experiments calculator that now sits on our website.
A DOE tool that lays out which runs to do and what the results tell you, so a process trial is planned rather than guessed at. Our team reshaped it and added a few tweaks before it went live on the site.
Nearly every placement here started with a teacher, careers lead or supervisor emailing to ask. Here is what we can take on, and how to set it up.
We take placement weeks through the year and give the student a real brief, a named engineer and honest feedback at the end. We can also come to you for a careers talk or run mock technical interviews.
We host doctoral researchers and post-docs on industrial placements, co-supervise final-year and MSc projects, and put real plant problems in front of students who want one that has not already been solved.
We are one small engineering firm in Peterborough and we cannot take everyone who asks. If you run placements too, we would rather pass a good candidate to you than turn them away with nothing.
Students, teachers, careers leads and university supervisors all use this form. Tell us who you are, what you are after and roughly when — we will tell you straight away whether we can take it.
