Dr Gopal Pandey is a Research Fellow at the Mechanical and Product Design Engineering Department, Swinburne University of Technology. His PhD work at Swinburne, conducted in partnership with CSIRO through the Victorian Hydrogen Hub (VH2), focused on the use of hydrogen in ironmaking and steelmaking, combining both experimental and numerical approaches to address the engineering challenges of replacing natural gas burners with hydrogen burners in various iron and steelmaking furnaces.

Dr Pandey's current role involves research on the ARENA-funded project "De-risking large-scale Australian fine-ore hydrogen ironmaking," led by the Australian National University in partnership with Swinburne and other industry and research collaborators. This project aims to advance hydrogen direct reduced ironmaking (H2DRI) for Australian Pilbara ores through improved fluidised bed reactor design and reactor kinetics, alongside the design of a novel electric smelting furnace (ESF) that processes hydrogen-based direct reduced iron produced from lower-grade Pilbara ores. This work is aimed at de-risking key technical barriers around reactor and smelter design ahead of large-scale commercial deployment.