Recent Additions to the EDC
Browse details of new data, projects and publications added to the EDC
07/01/2026
46 new projects added
GRN: UKRI1248
Period: 01/12/2025 to 01/12/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Silicon photonics is currently one of the fastest growing areas of research and development. The ability to exploit both the optical and electronic functionality of the semiconductor platform to process and manipulate data offers a route to dramatically increase the speeds, capacities, and efficiencies of optoelectronic systems. Capitalizing on their compact and efficient architectures, silicon photonic chips now underpin several key application areas such as data centre communications, where they are helping to expand internet bandwidths, and LiDAR, where they are enabling 4D vision in driverless vehicles. However, there are challenges associated in realizing the full suite of optoelectronic functionality using single-crystal silicon platforms due to their fixed silicon layer thickness. This is because the active and passive devices that make up the silicon circuits have different size requirements. For example, active devices are more efficient when the light is tightly confined in small waveguides, while passive devices are best when formed from larger waveguides as this helps to reduce the coupling and transmission losses. Moreover, the fixed silicon height can also make it difficult to fully optimise and integrate various components for operation across broad bandwidths or non-standard wavelength regions. The work in this proposal aims to tackle the integration challenge by developing a low cost and versatile polycrystalline silicon (polysilicon) platform technology that allows for the formation of components with a range of tailored dimensions across the photonic chip. The components will be fabricated via a combination of precision etching, deposition, and laser materials processing to achieve high-quality polysilicon waveguide devices. Importantly, as well as boosting the efficiency of the individual components through optimised designs, the improved coupling between components of different dimensions will reduce optical losses, resulting in lower energy consumption within the photonic integrated circuits. Furthermore, the transition from using single-crystal waveguide materials that require high temperature epitaxial growth to low temperature deposited polysilicon opens a route to a more sustainable manufacturing of silicon photonic systems. To explore this new platform technology, the team combines leading UK experts in the areas of semiconductor materials optimisation and integration, as well as active and passive silicon photonic component design and systems level engineering. Although much of the programme is focused on development of the fabrication procedures, a number of passive and active devices will be constructed, including couplers and modulators that will be used to benchmark the performance against state-of-the-art systems. The work will culminate in the demonstration of a high-speed photonic transmitter circuit constructed entirely from our polysilicon platform, illustrating the versatility and practicality of this approach. Thus, this project will take a transformative step towards unlocking the rich potential of integrated polysilicon optoelectronic systems
GRN: UKRI2708
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/04/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
The Challenge The UK's journey to net zero depends on understanding how people use energy in their homes, but accessing the data needed for this research is restricted. Smart meter data from households provides crucial insights for developing better energy policies, reducing fuel poverty, and improving building performance. However, privacy regulations and data protection rules create major barriers to accessing this information, slowing down vital research that could accelerate our transition to clean energy. Our Solution We will solve this data access problem using cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Our project will train advanced AI models called Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs) on the UK’s world-leading SERL Observatory dataset - a unique collection of smart meter data from 13,000 representative GB households, combined with detailed information about their buildings, occupants, and energy use patterns collected over five years. The AI models will learn the complex patterns in real energy data and generate completely synthetic datasets that look like real household energy data but contain no actual personal information. This synthetic data will have all the statistical properties researchers need while being completely privacy-preserving. This project directly advances EPSRC AI for Science objectives: developing AI capabilities across research fields to accelerate scientific discovery; increasing access to well-governed, high-quality datasets for AI; building interdisciplinary collaborations between AI and energy researchers; and embedding AI as a research tool in a fair and inclusive way. What We Will Deliver Over six months, we will create "Synthetic-SERL", the first dual-fuel synthetic smart meter dataset with long temporal sequences. This will include half-hourly gas and electricity data for 13,000 virtual households across full calendar years, each with contextual information about building and occupant characteristics and weather. We will rigorously test this synthetic data to ensure it provides genuine research utility while passing strict privacy audits. The entire dataset, along with the training code and tools to integrate the data into workflows, will be published under open licences, making it freely available to researchers worldwide. Impact and Applications This research will deliver targeted benefits across three key sectors. Academia will benefit from removal of barriers to accessing high-quality data, enabling and accelerating R&D that was previously restricted by privacy regulations. Industry will gain access to data for testing business cases and grid planning that rely on high-resolution energy data, supporting investment decisions in clean energy technologies. Government will have data to evaluate distributional impacts of net zero policies like time-of-use tariffs, ensuring a fair transition for all households. By democratising access to high-quality energy data, we will unlock research that was previously restricted, accelerate innovation in the energy sector, and create new partnerships between AI researchers and energy experts. This project establishes the foundation for future research that will push the boundaries of AI for energy decarbonisation.
GRN: UKRI221
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/10/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The ultimate goal of this project is to pioneer the world's first AI-driven Design for Forming (AI-DfF) platform, facilitating versatile applications in design development of high-performance manufacturable vehicle components. The transport sector accounts for about a quarter of global CO2 emissions. Lightweighting vehicles, especially their body parts, is crucial to increase fuel efficiency, which can reduce fuel consumption by up to 30%. Sheet forming processes, contributing to approximately 250-300 parts in every car, are essential in this regard because of their cost-effectiveness and superior stiffness-to-weight ratios. However, challenges such as manufacturing defects and a disjointed design process complicate achieving desired outcomes. An AI-driven solution is proposed to integrate manufacturability and performance metrics early in the design process. AI applications are emerging in the forming sector to enhance efficiency and product quality. Despite initial successes in AI-based modelling of forming processes, current models struggle with complex real-world scenarios, particularly intricate 3D geometries in automotive designs. Advanced Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer hope for simulating intricate physical systems, hinting at the potential for broader AI application in the forming sector. The project intends to meld knowledge from various domains, such as materials, mechanics, and AI, to tackle challenges in the forming space. Key objectives include creating an efficient database for forming, developing methods for complex geometric representation in AI-compatible formats, developing GNN-based surrogate models for AI-driven simulations, and establishing a platform that synergises data and AI models for optimal system design and performance. The envisioned AI platform aims to make design processes vastly more efficient, potentially accelerating the creation of novel vehicle parts by tenfold and significantly boosting their performance, manufacturability, and eco-friendliness. This innovation is crucial for the UK's manufacturing competitiveness in the rapidly advancing age of AI
GRN: UKRI3155
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/10/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
From renewable energy to transport electrification, every watt is converted multiple times by power electronic converters from generation to end-use. Achieving high efficiency, high reliability, low cost, and miniaturization in power converters is crucial for energy savings and decarbonization. The development of individually structured components has been isolated, with interactions between entities often overlooked. This lack of integrated design beyond individual components has largely restricted the full potential of emerging wide bandgap (WBG) power electronic devices. Consequently, improvements in power converters have been incremental, and technological demarcations continue to stifle innovation in power electronics. The development of power electronics products and technologies typically prioritizes efficiency, power density, affordability, and reliability, often neglecting reusability and waste management after consumption. Conventional power electronics converter design is linear, beginning with raw materials, progressing through the composition of individually structured components, and ending with disposal. Power electronic packages are challenging to reuse, repair, and recycle due to the inseparable physical connections of parts within the package. Significant resources and residual values inherent in power electronics are wasted through standard disposal methods such as landfilling and incineration, leading to environmental concerns. The lack of focus on reusability, reparability, and recyclability in power electronics undermines sustainability and the principles of a Circular Economy. In our quest for high performance and sustainability in power electronics, we aim to demonstrate a new design paradigm for power electronic packages and converters through structural and functional integration, with a focus on circularity from the design stage. We will cohesively design novel and high-performance power electronic device packages where parts can be separated and replaced. This innovative packaging concept and design incorporate new structures of ceramic embedding die chips, a new bonding method using liquid metal, and new assembling and disassembling processes for power electronics packages. We will explore the fundamental sciences and engineering implementations necessary to enable the reusability, repairability, and recyclability of all parts in the device package, ensuring their 'another life' and 'after life'. This approach is expected to deliver unprecedented performance and enable circular power electronics. We aim to achieve an advanced system for high-performance and circular power electronics through the following objectives. 1) Develop a ceramic-embedded power electronic package for scalable power converters with ultra-fast switching and excellent thermal management; 2) Innovate a floating die structure for power electronics packaging using liquid metal fluidic joints to address thermomechanical issues; 3) Create an integrated design and fabrication process for reusable, repairable, and recyclable power electronics using floating die structures enabled by liquid metal. The team from the University of Cambridge (CAM) and the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult (CSAC) will collaborate closely throughout the project. Transformative ideas and theoretical analyses from CAM are well complemented by the fabrication and testing expertise and facilities at CSAC. The project enjoys strong support from leading industrial partners, STMicroelectronics for SiC bare dies, MacDermid Alpha for packaging bonding materials, and Semikron Danfoss for thermal and packaging design. We believe this combined effort will derisk the fundamental research and accelerate the impact. The technology and knowledge generated from this project will inspire the academic community to explore more interdisciplinary research between Electrical Engineering, Material Science, and Economics. Research and training activities from this project will benefit the UK’s Power Electronics and Machine Drives (PEMD) industry with more assets contributing UK’s PEMD supply chain
GRN: UKRI3156
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/10/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
Because of their high energy density, Lithium-ion batteries are currently the dominating technology for powering electric vehicles and portable consumer electronics. However, their high costs, flammability, and the scarcity of elements such as Li, Co and Ni used in these batteries, have motivated the search for alternative energy storage solutions. This is particularly true for applications such as renewable energy storage where cost-efficiency, safety and sustainability are more important than energy density. This work focuses on aqueous Zinc-Ion Batteries (ZIBs), which are an exciting new battery technology where a Zn metal anode is cycled against a cathode typically made out of a transition metal oxide such as MnO2. These batteries do not rely on any rare or toxic materials, they use non-flammable aqueous electrolytes and are easy to recycle. However, ZIBs suffer from two major challenges that prevent their commercial adoption, the first is the growth of Zn dendrites and the second is hydrogen evolution reactions. Our project aims to address these issues by using new asymmetric separators that are rationally designed to cater for the different chemical processes taking place on the anode (plating and stripping) and the cathode (intercallation). These separators allow for a better distribution of the Zn-Ion flux, which addresses dendrite issues, and they will be paired with artificial solid-electrolyte interphase coatings to suppress hydrogen evolution reactions. Finally, a key goal of this project is to ensure that the proposed membranes can be manufactured at scale using a continuous Roll-to-Roll (R2R) process. Along with addressing the two challenges discussed above, this is critical for ensuring that the technology proposed in this project can have a tangible real-world impact. The two institutes working on this project (UCL and Cambridge) are equipped with state of the art scale-up manufacturing tools, including Roll-to-Roll coating, automated large area spray coating and pouch cell assembly lines. We will use these facilities to fabricate 5 Ah pouch cells with a lean anode design to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed technology to industrial stakeholders and help the UK advancing towards it net-zero goals
GRN: UKRI2417
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/01/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The world is currently trapped in a vicious heating cycle, whereby global warming increases the need for cooling technologies, but these technologies themselves exacerbate global warming. Vapour-compression refrigeration, the method that currently dominates, relies on gaseous refrigerants that contribute significantly to global warming and accumulative “forever chemicals”. For this reason, there is a widely acknowledged, urgent need to find a successor technology. Among the most promising such technologies are heat pumps based on barocaloric materials. Like vapour-compression refrigerants, these materials can be converted between high- and low-entropy phases by applying external pressure; the crucial distinction is that here both phases are solid, so that they cannot leak to the atmosphere. This enables clean, compact, and efficient refrigeration. In our previous EPSRC-funded work, we have developed an unprecedented understanding of the atomic structure and dynamics that give rise to barocaloric effects. As a result, we have developed several novel, highly promising materials. However, there is a limit to what can be learned from laboratory measurements on the materials alone. For instance, the thermal conductivity, which limits the cooling power, depends not just on the barocaloric material but on the whole device architecture, while the device efficiency is crucial to real-world competitiveness; both of these require a full working model to determine accurately. To progress further, we therefore need to build and test a working prototype, which will bridge the gap between academic materials research and future commercial development. This is precisely what we propose here. We will produce a working demonstrator model whose design and components can easily be tuned, and use our expertise in the physics and chemistry of barocaloric materials and heat transfer engineering to optimise its properties. In particular, we will use experience from other caloric materials to incorporate active regeneration, which will allow this device to operate over a larger, and hence more useful, temperature drop. At the conclusion of this project, the prototype will be sufficiently competitive with existing cooling systems to achieve early-stage financing towards further development. Achieving barocaloric refrigeration on a commercial and industrial scale will remove our dependence on fluorinated refrigerant gases, thus reducing their contribution to global warming (typical global warming potentials are over 1000 times that of CO2 by mass) and environmental accumulation. Because of this technology’s high efficiency, it will also reduce the power consumption associated with heating and cooling. Widespread use in the UK and worldwide (global market size US$233B; projected annual growth 6–7%) will have a very substantial economic impact
GRN: EP/U536830/1
Period: 25/08/2025 to 24/08/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Polymers provide solutions to many critical functions in modern life, from the single use plastics that have been the focus of recent environmental campaigns, to longer acting structural polymers and rubbers, to paints, lubricants, coatings and drug delivery formulations. The use of polymers is being re-evaluated in the light of the sustainable development goals and the need to leave the planet in a state fit for future generations. Many polymers remain essential for the functions they provide, and there is a drive to improve their sustainability, including through the design and manufacture of bioderived, potentially “net-zero” analogous polymers. Synthomer is a British manufacturer of high-performance speciality polymers and ingredients. Speciality polymers, accounting for less than 5% of the global polymer industry, are distinct from large volumes polymers used as plastics materials, but are indispensable to solve technical challenges. Synthomer thus work with over 6000 customers supporting the delivery of thousands of products from adhesives to coatings, construction and speciality healthcare applications. They employ 4,400 people across Europe, North America and Asia, and are a FTSE registered company, headquartered in London, with revenue of £2.0 B in 2023. To make a significant step change in the defossilisation of the fine chemicals industry, advancing knowledge, technical innovation and speed is critical. Synthomer has decided to join forces and build on an existing relationship with the University of York Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence, and their expertise in biobased chemistry, to catalyse the changes required. The ambition of this project is to co-deliver, after 3 years, a platform of bioderived monomers, ideally 4 or 5 species, that would act as replacements for essential building blocks of Synthomer’s products. These bioderived monomers would be from renewable sources, non-competitive with food, using CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow. Processes to form the monomers from the biomass would be as sustainable as possible, and Life Cycle Assessment would be conducted for the most promising candidates to mitigate the risks of undesirable side effects, for example from indirect land use change. Our Prosperity Partnership will bring together world-leading industry expertise in the manufacture of synthetic polymers, product performance and market requirements with outstanding academic biobased chemistry and sustainable polymer research. We will explore end-of-life options and end-use performance, and develop an understanding of how new monomers can be exploited in combination with existing monomers to optimise design and development of high-performance polymers. The products generated will contribute to Synthomer’s public commitment to reach net zero by 2050, whilst also building UK expertise and commercial competitive advantage in this important area. Using these ingredients will allow Synthomer’s customers to reduce their own carbon footprint, comply with future regulations and significantly advance their own sustainability goals. With co-creation and sharing of information at its heart, this Prosperity Partnership promises wide ranging benefits to colleagues across academia, industry and policy who are striving to develop the sustainable polymers required for the future. The project aligns with the strategic priorities of EPSRC, primarily Engineering Net Zero, and of the UK Government policy (Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy, 2021; and Mission Zero, 2022). The chemical industry is “one of the key blind spots in the global net zero energy debate” (IEA, 2018), where future innovation and growth will depend on value chains embracing sustainable feedstocks (Road to Net Zero, Cefic, 2022)
GRN: UKRI780
Period: 12/09/2025 to 12/09/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
Context: The global push towards sustainable energy has intensified the need for renewable sources like wind power. However, meeting rising demand requires a significant scale-up in wind turbine production capacity—the International Energy Authority estimates global installed wind capacity must triple by 2030 to achieve net-zero emissions targets. Continuing with current practices makes this goal impossible, posing a significant challenge for manufacturers. The Challenge: Conventional approaches to increase production, like building more factories and hiring more workers, would be prohibitively expensive. Production also relies on a highly skilled workforce that cannot easily be expanded. Additionally, increasing production speed may heighten the likelihood of manufacturing defects, undermining the strength of turbine blades and requiring costly re-works to design specifications on the production line. A new approach is needed to radically increase production throughput while maintaining quality and operational reliability. Aims and Objectives: The BladeUp Prosperity Partnership between the Bristol Composites Institute of the University of Bristol, LMAT, and Vestas aims to revolutionise wind turbine blade design for efficient, scalable production through machine learning-enabled, advanced computer methods. The key objectives are: Develop turbine blades optimised for ease and speed of manufacturing by accounting for defects/variability during the design phase. This will enable faster production with fewer defects requiring repair. Engineer blades with inherent tolerance to manufacturing imperfections and design uncertainty, ensuring reliability over their operational lifetime and eliminating the need for rework. Create a streamlined process to design for right-first-time manufacturing and for rapid introduction of new blade designs into production, minimising costly manufacturing trials. Achieving these goals would enable manufacturers to triple throughput while maintaining quality, with reasonable capital investments and workforce growth. Potential Applications and Benefits: The Partnership outputs will transform fundamental principles of wind turbine blade design, positioning the UK as a global leader in this critical renewable energy technology. Economically, it will create opportunities for workforce expansion and sustainable growth in the wind energy sector, enhancing energy security. Environmentally, accelerating wind power adoption will reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change impacts for current and future generations worldwide. More broadly, the novel design approaches could find applications in other sectors relying on large-scale composite structures, such as aerospace, automotive, and marine industries. The cutting-edge composite materials innovations will enable lighter, more fuel-efficient transportation solutions. Overall, our Partnership could catalyse the widespread transition to renewable energy and represents a vital step towards a sustainable future. By addressing manufacturing bottlenecks, it enables wind power to increase its market share and reliably meet clean energy demands as the world pursues an ambitious net-zero agenda
GRN: UKRI605
Period: 15/09/2025 to 15/09/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
My research examines the following questions. First, why and how do people become attached to fossil-fuelled ways of life in a wider context where greenhouse gas emissions urgently need to be cut? Second, can attachments to fossil-fuelled lives be disrupted? If so, how? I explored these questions in my PhD. I examined a case study of a northern English town – one which found itself at the centre of controversy because of plans to open a coal mine in the area. I showed that many of the town’s residents re-attached to the promise of new coal extraction, even though people had detached from coal industries following the closure of coal mines in the 1980s. I argued that this signalled a warning about how fossil fuel attachments can be unexpectedly resurrected, even when a transition towards low-carbon energy production has happened. At the same time, I showed how a small group of residents in the area attached to the possibility of a ‘net zero’ transition, where society is no longer dependent on fossil fuels. They did so after taking part in a democratic citizens’ forum, learning about climate change and devising solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I argued that this signalled an opportunity: That attachments to forms of life which are no longer reliant on fossil fuels can be formed, often at speed, when people re-imagine alternative futures. In this fellowship, I have two key objectives – to communicate the findings of my doctoral research to new audiences, and to open opportunities to carry out new research about people’s attachments to fossil fuelled and post-fossil fuelled ways of life. First, I aim to disseminate my PhD findings among two audiences – academic researchers who examine the politics of energy transitions, and climate change policymakers and campaigners. To publicise my research to academic scholars, I am: publishing my doctoral thesis as a book; writing a new paper in an academic journal, based on one of my thesis chapters; and giving presentations at two academic conferences. Policymakers and campaigners typically engage with content which is shorter than academic publications. I am writing two articles for online media and speaking about my research on a climate change podcast. In addition, I am co-producing a policy brief based on my, and other comparable, research. The brief will be shared with policy organisations (from local authorities and national government audiences to think-tanks and political parties). Second, I am applying for new funding opportunities to build and expand on my research. I will propose examining cases where workers detach from high-carbon industries (in the oil and gas sector) to attach to sustainable industries (e.g., work in renewable industries). My focus is the politics of their actions – how they challenge the power of fossil fuel industries by pointing to the possibility of alternative futures, even when doing so involves embracing risks and uncertainty. Overall, I want to use my research to contribute to tackling the climate emergency, so that we can protect people and future generations. My hope is that my research can play a role in contributing towards that outcome
GRN: UKRI1303
Period: 15/09/2025 to 15/09/2030
Funding Source: EPSRC
This Prosperity Partnership will create a Global Centre of Excellence, building on the successes of the well-established Innovation and Research Centre at Loughborough which is a collaboration between Perkins (as a Caterpillar UK subsidiary) and Loughborough University. The UK off-highway construction industry is 1st in Europe and 5th globally, and four times the size, in revenue terms, of the heavy-duty on-highway sector. Therefore, for the UK to meet its climate change targets as well as maintaining its excellent market share, it is imperative that it invests in solving the immense challenges of this sector that are significantly different from other sectors. Full electrification is not an option for many applications due to a range of complex scale, geographical, economic, and technical factors. Leveraging £2.57m of EPSRC investment, to deliver a total project value of £8m, this centre will develop disruptive technologies which will transform the design and engineering of complex heavy duty power systems to decarbonise this sector. The co-created vision and programme devised by Perkins and Loughborough University to undertake the foundational research required to decarbonise this hard to abate sector, 80% of which is off-highway, will investigate the use of alternative fuels including hydrogen and renewable fuels such as methanol and ethanol. The Perkins and Loughborough University partnership which is manifested in the Innovation and Research Centre at Loughborough, is ideally positioned to address these enormous challenges. With a track record of delivering excellent research through funding from bodies such as the Advanced Propulsion Centre, this team have a well-established collaborative working relationship and have extensive experience in co-creating impactful projects, combining the superior engineering capabilities and market knowledge of Perkins with the excellent academic capabilities of the Loughborough team. The outputs of the I&RC have been realised in many Perkins products which have been distributed worldwide, thus benefitting many downstream industries as well as the Perkins supply chain, much of which is in the UK. This Partnership will focus on improving the efficiency of a range of alternative fuels, reducing harmful emissions, enhancing materials durability and performance, and creating engineering design tools for the rapid, robust, optimal design of new products. To support this significant undertaking, Perkins is making substantial investment in hardware and Loughborough is investing over £1m in the centre’s infrastructure. The prosperity partnership funding will support early TRL projects complimenting the existing portfolio: to create a state-of-the-art facility delivering end-to-end research for this sector and facilitating impact beyond current capability. Additional benefits will be the consequential strengthening of the supply chain for manufacture of new products for alternative fuels, a nucleus of skilled engineers capable of designing and delivering complex power systems into the future, and a knowledge transfer of technology to the wider automotive industry. The expansion of the already successful I&RC into a centre of excellence for focused heavy-duty off-highway power systems will strengthen the UK’s reputation and capability in this sector, creating the foundations for a thriving manufacturing industry into the future
GRN: UKRI1299
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/10/2030
Funding Source: EPSRC
The RENEW project tackles the urgent requirement to reduce carbon emissions in the UK’s heating sector, a major contributor to the nation’s overall emissions. The UK has established a legally binding target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, with heating presently accounting for a third of these emissions, mainly from natural gas usage. Decarbonising this sector is crucial for meeting climate change objectives and presents significant challenges due to its scale and integration complexities. Electrified heating systems at both communal and household levels can offer viable routes towards decarbonisation when supplied by a net-zero electricity sector, as electric heat pumps can deliver 3-5 units of heat output for each unit of electricity input. Communal systems, such as district heating networks powered by large, highly efficient heat pumps, are particularly promising, potentially offering substantial cost savings. However, increased demand on the electricity grid during extreme cold periods, which may also coincide with low renewable energy production, could strain the system, potentially leading to serious supply disruptions. To address these challenges, the RENEW project proposes a whole-system analysis approach through refining the Whole-electricity System Investment Model (WeSIM). This tool has been previously developed by the RENEW research team to identify cost-efficient investment and operational strategies for low-carbon energy systems and has a strong track record in providing evidence to policymakers and stakeholders in the UK. RENEW will build upon previous work by its research team and enhance the WeSIM tool to better accommodate electrified district heating technologies. The upgraded tool will use climate-based models to generate projections for future extreme weather conditions, which will affect electricity and heat demand but also renewable energy production. The contributions of the RENEW project are multifaceted. Firstly, it will gather extensive historical data and employ climate models to simulate future weather conditions, and in particular extreme events that could severely impact the energy system. Secondly, it will upgrade the WeSIM model to optimise the deployment of electrified heating technologies for projected future climate extremes, focusing on the optimal type, capacity, and location of technologies such as air-, ground-, and water-source heat pumps. Thirdly, the project will identify cost-effective, climate-resilient pathways for the UK’s integrated electricity and heat sectors, enhancing energy supply security against extreme conditions. The project is organised into five main work packages, led by researchers from the three collaborating universities with strong track records in energy systems and resilience studies. Work packages include: 1) managing the project, 2) generating data-driven climate scenarios, 3) upgrading the WeSIM tool as open-source, 4) applying the tool to case studies for evaluating adaptation strategies to climate extremes in energy systems, and 5) stakeholder engagement and dissemination. The RENEW project involves a team of world-leading researchers from Newcastle University, Brunel University London, and Imperial College London whose expertise spans climate change impacts, whole-energy system modelling, and decision-making under uncertainty in energy systems. In addition, close collaboration is envisaged with stakeholders at regional/national levels, including the Association for Decentralised Energy, Birmingham Energy Institute, Department for Energy Security & Net Zero, Energy Demand Research Centre, Met Office, Newcastle City Council and Northern Powergrid. This broad collaboration aims to accelerate RENEW’s impact and ensure its alignment with national energy and climate policies, providing a holistic strategy for a transition to a just and prosperous net-zero future
GRN: UKRI778
Period: 01/09/2025 to 01/09/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
Manufacturing plays a key part for achieving and going beyond NetZero by 2050. Manufacturing accounts for 14% of the UK territorial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and will be vital for making and maintaining the emerging technologies underpinning the green transition. Labour productivity is crucial to achieve the ambitions 2050 targets while growing our living standard with an aging population and low birth rate. UK Growth has been sluggish falling behind many peer economies. Manufacturing’s drive for connectivity and data has laid the foundation for digital technologies. However, the full gains in productivity and efficiency, can be realised only by incorporating artificial intelligence (AI). Optimising, simultaneously: productivity, resilience, and sustainability exceeds human capacity. The advancement of AI offers unparalleled potential for manufacturing, by empowering people. Examples include adapting to radical demand & supply changes, managing complex sets of human and machine resources, or dexterously adapting to in-process variations. Humans and AI offer co-working, with automation could supercharge productivity by +36% while reducing emissions below 1990 levels. The vision: Position the UK as a world leader in research and commercialisation of AI-empowered autonomous machines and systems to transform manufacturing productivity and sustainability for a net positive future by empowering people. The aim: Deliver, collaboratively with manufacturing businesses, leading-edge technologies for robust, safe, trust-worthy, fault-tolerant, and co-operative autonomous AI systems for manufacturing and establish a platform for their design, development, testing, and validation. Key objectives: defined with our stakeholders (users, providers, governance) to achieve future sustainable manufacturing and surpass NetZero by 2050: Eliminate all waste and emissions in complex, interdependent manufacturing ecosystems (aiming for zero emissions and waste, zero downtime, double life expectancy). Enable safe and meaningful work with AI systems, empowering workers to contribute their skills regardless of their location – whether remotely or on-site - and physical ability. Supercharge productivity by increasing the autonomy of AI-powered machines (+40%). Enhance resilience and agility in decentralised, circular, interconnected production systems and networks (reduce time to recovery -50%, towards zero setup and changeover time, towards batch size 1). UK flagships to act as lighthouses (four+ sectors) to facilitate the exchange of expertise and knowledge between industrial experts, factory workers and academic researchers. To address these objectives, the hub will focus on three research themes focusing at three levels of manufacturing ecosystems: AI-powered machines for agile and effective task execution Self-optimising AI for agile production systems AI-enhanced logistics and Total Quality Control for distributed, circular production networks Five research priorities will investigate the underpinning AI challenges across the themes: Edge AI for real-time digitisation of manufacturing ecosystems Adaptive skill learning and Human-AI collaboration for advanced manufacturing ecosystems Hybrid collective AI for distributed design, planning, and control of manufacturing ecosystems Verification and validation for safe and reliable AI in manufacturing Environmental, social, and economic context of AI in manufacturing To unlock the transformative effect of AI and rapidly move manufacturing beyond NetZero, the hub will work with key industrial sectors including automotive, aerospace, clean energy, and food&drink to setup flagship test and demonstration ecosystems. These will act as light houses for the wider industry to showcase best in class applications of AI to eliminate waste and emissions, enable safe and flexible working, supercharge productivity, and enhance the resilience and agility of critical processes
GRN: UKRI1890
Period: 31/10/2025 to 31/10/2032
Funding Source: EPSRC
FRAME-FM aims to enable the fast and easy processing of diverse, complex and very large (peta-byte scale) environmental datasets by end-users in economic sectors including energy, food, finance and logistics. We will achieve this aim by delivering a framework that facilitates the development of Foundation Models (FMs): machine learning (ML) models that can encapsulate the information contained in large datasets – such as those existing in the data archives of NERC’s Environmental Data Service (EDS) – and can be fine-tuned to perform specialised tasks(1). FMs can greatly simplify the process of developing solutions to real-world challenges because they can be tailored to address specific tasks and can be easier to interact with than processing large raw datasets. FMs can contribute to the democratisation of data access, particularly benefitting end-users who may lack the computing resources and specialised knowledge required to process peta-byte scale datasets (or develop FMs) in the first place. However, creating environmental FMs is currently difficult because producers of environmental data, such as NERC EDS centres, lack the required digital infrastructure. The framework developed by the FRAME-FM project will include the software infrastructure, AI tools and standardised workflows necessary for NERC EDS. The FRAME-FM framework will be open-source and, although developed for environmental datasets, it will be designed to be generalisable – a key design principle of FRAME-FM will be to enable all data producers (including NERC centres) to deploy the framework directly on top of existing data archives – therefore benefitting other areas of science. The FRAME-FM project will evaluate existing state-of-the-art approaches to develop FMs, conduct user research to co-design the framework (ensuring its suitability for the environmental research community), consider key aspects such as security, explainability and environmental sustainability, build the software components necessary to test the framework, and develop at least one proof-of-concept relevant to end-users (e.g. renewable energy generation, food security, early warning systems for property protection) using data already available in the EDS archives. FRAME-FM will deliver two key outputs: A software infrastructure framework that enables and facilitates the development of FMs from big environmental datasets At least one practical demonstration of the framework to train AI Models using approaches typically used in FM development In addition, FRAME-FM will directly skill up multi-disciplinary researchers across EDS centres, and help speed up the adoption and use of FMs across public and private sector in a fair and inclusive way, contributing to make the UK a world-leader in the use of AI for environment. (1) Bommasani, Rishi, et al. "On the opportunities and risks of foundation models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07258(2021)
GRN: UKRI2696
Period: 07/10/2025 to 07/04/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
The proposed work is an original research project with two main objectives: (1) to provide a generalised mixing theory for shear-induced dispersion and (2) to test the theory by applying it to four iconic mixing problems. The theory is pertinent to many engineering and real-life situations involving transport phenomena with variable density, viscosity, and other transport properties. Such situations are encountered in a variety of contexts with vastly different length scales—from the oceanic to the microscopic. The project is an ambitious attempt to generalise theoretical concepts and tools recently developed in our combustion-focused investigations in order to develop a theoretical framework with broad interdisciplinary applications. The theory will be applied to the following four problems: Flame instabilities in a Hele-Shaw cell, focusing on the coupling between Taylor dispersion and classical instabilities associated with variable properties, including the Darrieus–Landau instability (associated with variable density), the Saffman–Taylor instability (associated with variable viscosity), and the diffusive-thermal instability (associated with unequal mass and heat diffusivities). In the project, specific emphasis will be dedicated to hydrogen combustion. Effect of Taylor dispersion on the Rayleigh–Benard instability (associated with buoyancy) in a Hele-Shaw cell. Effect of Taylor dispersion on the double-diffusive convection instability (associated with buoyancy and differential diffusion) in a Hele-Shaw cell. Effect of Taylor dispersion on the Marangoni convection (associated with variable interfacial surface tension) in a thin fluid layer. The objectives of the work will be accomplished through a two-phase approach, the first being based on theoretical tools such as scaling analyses and perturbation methods and the second relying both on theoretical tools such as modelling and linear stability analyses and numerical tools involving numerical computations applied to the four selected problems. The success of the project will pave the way for future proposals that will benefit various beneficiaries. Such beneficiaries include applied mathematicians, fluid dynamicists, combustion scientists, oceanographers, physiologists, and others. A concrete illustration of research areas on which the project is expected to have an impact is that of hydrogen combustion, to which one of the test problems in this proposal is dedicated. Specifically, the outcomes of this problem should contribute to improving our understanding of hydrogen-flame dynamics in micro-engines that can power devices such as micro air vehicles (MAVs) and micro-satellites, thereby assisting engineers to design these devices more efficiently. With hydrogen being regarded as one of the most promising fuels for the future in order to decarbonise current fuels, this research should contribute to placing the UK at the forefront of international research efforts to address global greenhouse gas concerns. This is also in line with the EPSRC's strategic plan towards achieving "engineering net zero" via "transformative low and zero carbon—hydrogen and alternative liquid fuels"
GRN: UKRI173
Period: 01/11/2025 to 01/07/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
Great British Chemicals (GBC) is a national hub uniting industry, researchers, and policymakers to revolutionise UK chemicals production by advancing innovative, scalable technologies that transform waste and renewable resources into sustainable solutions, tackling the grand challenge to reduce fossil fuel dependency while securing resilient, environmentally sound, and economically vibrant supply and value chains. GBC will demonstrate how industry can exploit the net zero transition as one of the most profitable areas for the UK, ensuring a strong economy and an improved environment that is fair and creates inclusive opportunities. The chemistry-using industries are a vast and complex sector, comprising several diverse sub-sectors, each playing a crucial role in various aspects of modern life. GBC has identified opportunities, leveraging the outcomes of major UKRI investments such as CircularChem, Flue2Chem, the Catalysis Hub, doctoral training grants and aligned research and partnerships. It will create, collate, and translate knowledge from research on defossilising (rather than decarbonising) chemicals across technologies, policy, energy, and industrial systems in partnership with industry, civic bodies, national government, and the third sector. The challenge areas have been described in recent reports: Innovate UK Sustainable Carbon Ambition, Royal Society “Defossilising the Chemical Industry”, IChemE Climate Change Action Plans, DESNZ Unlocking Resource Efficiency, Phase 2 Chemicals Report. The triple drivers leading to a focus on defossilising chemicals are: the major contribution of the chemicals sector to the UK’s industrial carbon emissions (19%); the dependence of all industries and citizens’ health on chemicals (96% manufactured goods); the critical importance of the chemicals sector to the UK economy (£61bn/a exports). Reducing the UK’s carbon emissions by 78% between 1990 and 2035 (6th Carbon Budget) cannot be achieved without addressing the carbon embedded in the feedstocks and processes in chemical using industries. GBC’s whole system approach includes mapping hotspots for replacement with zero fossil alternatives with the least disruption to the existing infrastructure, accelerating adoption of smarter technologies and chemistries, and evaluating economic and environmental impacts. GBC will target the foundation chemicals within the existing petrochemical industries and will support the community to create a new, circular chemicals supply chain. GBC’s end-to-end approach will minimise the demand for energy and competition for limited resources, such as biomass. Adopting waste hierarchy principles could optimise less energy-intensive manufacturing, including the production of vehicles, wood/paper products, consumer hygiene products, pharmaceuticals and electronics, among other industries. These sectors provide opportunities for industrial symbiosis by providing by-products as feedstocks for other industries and can provide new revenue streams for businesses. The research will be delivered via a Moonshot project on the digital acceleration of technology for Chemical transformations, three work streams: Carbon Capture, CO2 Use, and Process Intensification, all underpinned by three cross-cutting Function Streams: Planet, Prosperity, and People. Further, innovative ideas for co-creation and co-delivery with wider stakeholders will be provided via Flexible Funding structured as follows: Phase 1 (early stage) - identify high-potential research innovations and assess their industry applicability through feasibility studies, market analysis, and project prioritisation based on scalability and readiness. Phase 2 (mid stage) – advance prioritised projects to validate tools/services by supporting development, industry collaborations for real-world testing, and technical and commercial validation. Phase 3 (late stage) – enable full-scale deployment by finalising development to industry standards, supporting adoption through pilot programmes, and establishing commercialisation pathways for long-term industry uptake.
GRN: UKRI2199
Period: 01/08/2025 to 01/08/2032
Funding Source: EPSRC
As the global economy shifts towards low-carbon solutions, the electrification of transport has increased the demand for electric motors with maximised power and torque density, and reduced weight to enhance efficiency. Critical to this development are advanced materials for electrical insulation, such as slot liners and coatings, which are essential to e-motors. The push for faster vehicle charging speed requires higher system voltages, introducing significant challenges for insulation materials, especially as 800 V technology becomes mainstream. These materials must withstand high temperatures, electrical stresses, and exposure to cooling fluids while maintaining high breakdown voltages (BDV) and partial discharge inception voltages (PDIV), ensuring long-term reliability. Traditional high-temperature insulation materials, such as ceramics and polyimides, present significant limitations including prone to crack, complex processing conditions, and limited recyclability. In contrast, polyaryletherketones (PAEKs) have emerged as promising candidates for insulating electric wires and hairpins in e-motors due to its non-polar nature. PAEKs offer exceptional thermal endurance and chemical resistance, enhancing the reliability of e-motors, particularly in high-voltage systems. Moreover, PAEKs are lightweight, recyclable, offering less hazardous and more energy efficient manufacturing processes compared to ceramics and polyimides. Despite these advantages, the underlying mechanisms of how these semi-crystalline polymers behave under high-voltage conditions are currently less understood. The aim of this research is to fundamentally understand the development of the microstructure of PAEKs during wire processing and wire forming, and their subsequent impact on dielectric properties such as BDV and PDIV. To achieve this, the first objective will be conducting a systematic investigation to benchmark detailed correlations between crystallinity, crystal morphology, and amorphous composition with BDV and PDIV under both ambient and elevated temperatures. The second and third objectives will be analysing the complex microstructures presented in commercial wires, as well as the mechanical conditions during the wire forming process. Predictive models will be developed to forecast their insulation performance. We will replicate the thermal and mechanical conditions observed in industrial wire processing to establish direct links between processing and forming parameters and the resulting microstructure. The knowledge obtained from these investigations will enable us to make reliable predictions and optimisation strategies of the final insulation quality, providing superior breakdown voltage strength and minimal discharge occurrences. This project will advance our fundamental understanding of the impact of microstructure on the dielectric properties and electrical failure mechanisms of PAEKs under high-voltage conditions. The collaboration with the Winding Centre of Excellence (WCE) at the HVMC will provide direct access to both discrete and continuous hairpin winding facilities, enabling in-process testing of electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties. This collaboration is crucial for optimising the design and manufacturing processes of PAEK-coated wires, ultimately contributing to the development of more efficient and reliable e-motors. The results from this project will facilitate the development of tailored PAEK grades for e-motor applications, optimising wire production and forming processes. This knowledge will accelerate innovation cycles, providing tools for OEMs and tier suppliers to rapidly assess and address their performance requirements. It will enable materials and e-machine companies to explore new design approaches with thinner coatings, enhancing their ability to meet evolving industry standards and performance needs in transport electrification. The project’s outcomes will have broader applications extending beyond automotive e-motors to include aerospace and marine e-motors, and cables and power transmission systems that also endure high electrical stresses and temperatures
GRN: UKRI642
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/04/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
IGNITE is a multi-university/industry partnership that will kick start a green steel revolution supporting a just transition to net zero economic growth. Over the decades UK industrial communities have been disproportionately affected by decline. For example, even before the recent fuel price increases up to half of Neath Port Talbot residents were in fuel poverty. The current potential for the transition of UK steelworks to net zero operation holds initial challenges but longer-term opportunity. In the decades to come indigenous steel production can drive a green industrial revolution. The Swansea University led innovation ecosystem of UK Universities have supported SUSTAIN to contribute to ca £2.5bn investment in a decarbonisation pathway. This new UKRI application to create the IGNITE Sustainable Manufacturing Hub aims to trailblaze the emerging opportunities for UK wide produced green steel to underpin our just transition to net zero. IGNITE has three core pillars (Grand Challenges) namely development of novel green-steel products for future manufacturing (GC1 Sustainable Demand), support the transition of the industry to a fully circular model (GC2 Resilient Supply) and explore the opportunity to provide steel into the market with a service offering (GC3 Steel as a Service) extending lifetime and performance and controlling the long-term recycling supply chain. These align to key ambitions: GC1 - Profitable supply chains for sustainable products by 2035 GC2 - Re-shore 5 million tonnes of supply by 2040 GC3 - Commercialisation of steel as a service by 2035 To solve the grand challenges and deliver on the ambitions IGNITE will address four cross-cutting interdisciplinary scientific research challenges namely: Sustainable metallurgical design (RC1): providing the tools to design the metals of tomorrow Durability and performance monitoring (RC2); creating the techniques to evaluate and extend lifetime Enablers of servitization (RC3); understanding the barriers and opportunities of steel as a service Optimising steel use and re-use (RC4): re-imagining the design process to maximise steel deployment and the ease of reuse and recycling. Ultimately IGNITE should power-up delivery of novel products into three key market facing Demand led supply chains namely: D1 Energy: steel supports the manufacturing and deployment of renewable energy solutions from SMRs to floating offshore wind and new forms of energy generation storage and release for photovoltaics, hydrogen electrolysers and storage solutions. D2 Transport: green steel will underpin marine, land and air transport for the future and critically enable new industries ranging from the hydrogen transport economy to new and lower cost materials for energy storage (thermal, electrical and calorific). D3 Infrastructure: green steel has the potential to become the material of choice for better buildings, public and private sector civil engineering modernisation and in defence applications. The IGNITE Manufacturing Hub will also be a central pathway to establishing a National Manufacturing Institute for Wales building on the successful models developed by AMRC, WMG and NMIS creating an allied but distinctive operation that supporting both regional economic development and wider UK and international impact. Building on our heritage of support and innovation in metals the NMIW will support the colocation and growth of synergistic manufacturing opportunities on glass and plastic materials supporting a UK and worldwide transition to functional materials for the net zero economy
GRN: UKRI1893
Period: 20/10/2025 to 20/10/2032
Funding Source: EPSRC
The proposed project, “CATALYSE”, will develop, and maintain long-term collaborations between Europe, China, South Africa, and Nigeria towards renewable dimethyl ether (DME) fuel production from CO2. This objective will be achieved through joint research in new process systems and material development in direct air capture (DAC) and utilization. This requires skills and knowledge in experimental study, process modelling, analysis and optimization, computational material design and catalysis which will be strengthened by the individual mobility of researchers between Europe and the participating countries. There are 14 partners involved in CATALYSE who are world-leading in their respective areas of which there are 3 industrial partners. CATALYSE will start in January 2025 for 48 months. There will be 25 experienced and 32 early-stage researchers to participate in 330 person-month exchange visits. A total of €1.52m funding is requested to support the planned exchange activities. The European partners are experts in process modelling and optimisation, process intensification, computational material design, catalysis, and CO2 utilisation while the Chinese partners are experts in process intensification, green hydrogen production and DAC. The South African partners are experts in DAC and sustainability assessments while the Nigeria partners are experts in renewable energy and green hydrogen production. Knowledge transfer and training will take place through the planned secondments. We will generate at least 30 Journal publications and 30 conference papers. In addition, 2 Special Issues will be published in leading journals such as Applied Energy, 2 Workshops and 2 Special Sessions at major international conferences will be organised to disseminate project results
GRN: UKRI1159
Period: 04/12/2024 to 04/12/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The proposed project, “CATALYSE”, will develop, and maintain long-term collaborations between Europe, China, South Africa, and Nigeria towards renewable dimethyl ether (DME) fuel production from CO2. This objective will be achieved through joint research in new process systems and material development in direct air capture (DAC) and utilisation. This requires skills and knowledge in experimental study, process modelling, analysis and optimisation, computational material design and catalysis which will be strengthened by the individual mobility of researchers between Europe and the participating countries. There are 14 partners involved in CATALYSE who are world-leading in their respective areas of which there are 3 industrial partners. CATALYSE will start in December 2024 for 48 months. There will be 25 experienced and 32 early-stage researchers to participate in 330 person-month exchange visits. A total of €1.52m funding is requested to support the planned exchange activities. The European partners are experts in process modelling and optimisation, process intensification, computational material design, catalysis, and CO2 utilisation while the Chinese partners are experts in process intensification, green hydrogen production and DAC. The South African partners are experts in DAC and sustainability assessments while the Nigeria partners are experts in renewable energy and green hydrogen production. Knowledge transfer and training will take place through the planned secondments. We will generate at least 30 Journal publications and 30 conference papers. In addition, 2 Special Issues will be published in leading journals such as Applied Energy, 2 Workshops and 2 Special Sessions at major international conferences will be organised to disseminate project results
GRN: UKRI1163
Period: 01/01/2025 to 01/12/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
We seek to improve the efficacy, efficiency and reproducibility of focused ion beam (FIB) nanofabrication processes for advanced photonic materials and devices, and in turn their optical performance and energy efficiency, through the application of deep learning. Our methods will enable rapid optimization of nanostructures for optical function informed by real process and material characteristics, rather than analytical/numerical approximations or wasteful trial-and-error. Deep learning offers a novel, systematic, data-driven approach to modelling the FIB milling process that is applicable to arbitrary nano/microstructural geometries in any target medium, whereby milling outcomes can be accurately predicted without the need for knowledge or understanding of (often unavailable/inaccessible) material parameters, the fundamental physics of ion-atom interactions, or the mathematical description of time-dependent 3D structural geometry. We will show how neural networks can: rapidly accrue understanding of the complex relationships among numerous sample and system parameters that affect process outcomes for a variety of metal, semiconductor and dielectric target materials commonly used in nanophotonic devices, to expedite or negate the need for conventional 'dose testing'; be configured to solve challenging inverse problems, answering the question "what input design will generate a desired output structure?"; optimize (rather than just simulate) milling processes, to answer the question "what input design and process parameters will best deliver a structure with prescribed optical and/or nanomechanical properties?". Alongside these trained functionalities we expect emergent capabilities, such as the ability to make accurate predictions for unseen target media, and inherent compensation for systematic artefacts. The project aligns to the EPSRC strategic priority on "Frontiers in Engineering and Technology": it will leverage novel capabilities and ideas in deep learning and nanophotonics to facilitate "breakthroughs in ... tools and techniques enabling researchers and businesses to make, measure and model more efficiently and effectively," and to "accelerate design to manufacture of the new materials needed for a more resilient, sustainable UK". FIB milling is a key enabling technology in many areas of fundamental and applied research, and high-tech (electronics and photonics) industrial applications of importance to the UK's position at the forefront of physical and bio sciences research and advanced technology development - for micro/nanoscale rapid prototyping, materials/device characterisation and cross-sectional/tomographic imaging (including in support of other high-throughput, e.g. lithographic, nanofabrication processes), and transmission electron microscopy sample preparation. Our initial focus will be on applications in nanophotonics (e.g. to the optimized fabrication of metasurface optics and energy-efficient optomechanical time crystals), but the techniques developed will be transferrable to beneficiaries in other domains of engineering, physical science and technology, deployable on any FIB platform, and indeed adaptable to other direct-write micro/nanofabrication processes
GRN: EP/U536866/1
Period: 01/10/2025 to 30/09/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The rapid growth in portable devices, including sensors and consumable electronics defines a new era for photovoltaics (PVs) because of the demand for innovative and sustainable power sources that can be easily integrated with high-value products. The integrated PV device can also act as an optical signal receiver, enabling the establishment of a simultaneous optical wireless communication (OWC) network among the interconnected IoT devices while harvesting energy from surrounding light sources. This Overseas Travel Grant aims to access the required specialist facilities and related expertise at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia and perform a series experiments to improve the power conversation efficiency and communication bandwidth of my solar cells. The objectives of my visit will be (i) study the surface passivation pathways using ultrathin alumina capping layer as well as Cd-free buffers to achieve low-cost, environmentally friendly, and high efficiency solar cells; (ii) optimise local chemical environment engineering to assess my designs for solar cells as low-speed OWC receivers; (iii) organise an innovation workshop during my visit to create a valuable platform at UNSW to promote project outputs in energy natural OWC and forge sustainable collaborations between academics, engineers and wider energy/telecommunication companies in Australia. Through the proposed novel approaches, we aim to achieve 15% kesterite solar cells with its communication bandwidth significantly increased from its current kHz to several hundred MHz. Importantly, this international collaboration will allow me to establish new partnerships with world-leading experts in thin film solar cells. By the exchange of knowledge and skills, it provides a special opportunity for professional growth that I will use to advance scientific research and innovation in Northumbria university. This will be achieved by generating essential feasibility data for a more extensive collaborative research programme that will include industrial partners from both UK and Australia. Moreover, the scientific findings will be disseminated widely through gold open access where possible, conferences and outreach events to maximum the benefit to researchers in the field and wider public
GRN: UKRI1491
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/10/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
This proposed study aims to contribute to the finance governance theme by investigating the empowerment of marginalized communities (i.e., the Indigenous communities) through equity stakes in the energy sector, which bridges broader corporate governance frameworks with the critical goals of energy transition and sustainability. Indigenous inclusivity is essential for the sustainable development of the energy sector, addressing long-standing social and economic inequalities while fostering just energy transitions. Indigenous groups play key roles in energy projects in Canada and the United Kingdom (UK), with their lands and resources often forming the foundation for large-scale developments. In the UK, marginalized communities, particularly in Scotland, have voiced concerns about energy projects, such as accusations of "bribery" in gaining support for wind farms. While community energy initiatives that allow local groups to invest in green projects exist, their growth remains limited. In Canada, innovative strides are being made toward inclusive economic participation of Indigenous communities. A notable example in Canada involves Indigenous communities leveraging government-backed guaranteed loans to purchase equity stakes in energy companies, thereby entering corporate structures. This innovative approach, which encourages Indigenous communities to acquire equity stakes in major energy projects, promotes financial inclusion while encouraging them to participate economically in energy companies and contribute to energy transition efforts. Despite its promise, this pathway presents challenges. Indigenous shareholders, as minority stakeholders, often face barriers to having their voices heard in corporate governance, raising concerns about tokenism. Addressing agency issues for minority equity holders is essential to ensuring genuine empowerment and improving energy transformation efficiency and climate risk mitigation efforts. This research project aims to examine studies on the empowerment of Indigenous communities in financial inclusion, energy transformation, and climate risk mitigation by focusing on Indigenous equity participation developments in Canada and providing cross-national insights to inform strategies for empowering marginalized communities in the UK. Through narrative syntheses of academic literature and media reports, this project seeks to: - Assess the current knowledge on Indigenous community empowerment in Canada and the UK, building on existing literature. - Explore the implementation and challenges of enabling equity stakes for Indigenous communities in the energy sector. - Identify knowledge gaps and offer policy and practice recommendations to enhance financial inclusion and active participation in energy transformation. - Share findings with cross-sectoral stakeholders and the public to drive meaningful impact
GRN: EP/Z534249/1
Period: 01/04/2025 to 31/03/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The development of new materials and devices that are relevant towards achieving net-zero either by energy generation OR by reducing power consumption is of critical importance to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Closed shell organic semiconductors have been phenomenally successful in energy related device applications. Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) have become ubiquitous technology and organic photovoltaic devices (OPV) have efficiencies approaching those of conventional inorganic technologies. In order to move beyond the state-of-the-art it is necessary to overcome the fundamental issue associated with dark, low energy triplet states in these materials. We propose to create a new family of organic semiconductors and devices based on open-shell materials. The materials have the unique combination of high luminescence efficiency and absence of lower energy dark states meaning that the major loss processes in current generation optoelectronic devices can be overcome. Additionally, the presence of unpaired electrons means that these materials can also be used to optically generate high-spin states for use in quantum applications. Following on from our initial discovery that organic radicals based on (tris(2,4,6-trichlorophenyl) methyl) TTM can be made emissive through correct chemical functionalization. We propose a series of chemical systems which will achieve improved and unique optical properties. We will then use these new materials to understand and demonstrate their performance in a series of (spin)optical device applications. Specifically we will aim to design i) highly emissive, stable organic radicals with narrow FWHM for use in display technology. ii) strongly absorbing radical based polymers for use in organic photovoltaics and iii) high-spin radical systems which can be optically manipulated. Thus we propose a true paradigm shift in organic optoelectronic design and function by moving from closed-shell to open-shell systems. In doing so we believe that we open the door to a new chapter of spin and optically active materials which retain or improve upon all the benefits of traditional organic semiconductors whilst eliminating their biggest problems
GRN: UKRI779
Period: 01/09/2025 to 01/09/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
Context The UK Government’s net zero strategy predicts a 60% increase in electricity demand due to the switching of energy supply modes from fossil fuel to electricity in major sectors including transport. Transport is currently the largest emitting sector, accounting for 29.1% in 2023 and decarbonizing all forms of transport is a national key priority. Railway is a cleaner transport mode, and the UK’s largest electricity consumer (~4 TWh p.a. ~1.2% of UK total). The railway's decarbonisation ambitions to phase out diesel trains by 2040 will result in a major increase in electricity demand (~ 2TWh), requiring up to £30 billion investment to electrify/decarbonize ~15,000 single track kilometre (stk) rail. The challenge the project addresses Transport electrification requires extensive updates of both the power and transport networks, which are extremely expensive and time-consuming to deploy, e.g. rail electrification costs £1~2.5m per stk, while the current lead times for critical new carbon projects to connect to the power grid are now over 15 years, and investment in transmission capacity is falling behind deployment, leading to >£1Bn cost of managing constraints. For example, in 2021, it was reported that 7TWh electricity including 2.3 TWh wind power was curtailed at a costing £1.5billion. Aims and objectives To address the dual challenges of electricity curtailment due to congestion and increased electricity demand from transport electrification in a whole system approach, this project aims to exploit the commercial application of the Networked Energy Hubs concept integrating technologies developed by Project lead in previous EPSRC projects (EP/L001063/1, EP/R030243/1 and EP/P004636/1), transforming the inflexible transport energy demands into flexible loads, absorbing excessive electricity during the night which otherwise will be curtailed to power trains and potentially road haulage in the daytime. The energy hubs are modular microgrid solutions that integrate battery storage and local renewable generation, interfacing with both the power grid and traction power supply network for trains. When they are networked and controlled via a communication network, they form virtual power plants to provide aggregated flexibility and ancillary services to the power grid, including wind power curtailment reduction, demand flexibility service, and frequency and voltage services. The project has 6 coherent work-packages to achieve the following objectives: Develop a stakeholder network and engage with key stakeholders to scope commercial applications of the networked energy hub technology (WP1). Identify use cases for railway and road electrification and decarbonization (WP2). Conduct desktop feasibility study including data analysis and initial design (WP3). Conduct simulation studies and hardware-in-loop experimental validation (WP4). Assess the technological transferability, including off-shelf solutions, communication infrastructure, and cyber security issues (WP5). Conduct coast benefit analysis and project dissemination (WP6). Potential applications and benefits The project will first explore applications to the GB railway network in decarbonizing ~15,000 stk non-electrified routes, avoid constructing overhead line for at least 3,000 stk track in rural areas which can instead be served by battery trains that are powered by ~500 networked energy hubs, saving > £3billion CAPEX. The aggregated battery storage in these networked hubs would be c. 2GWh, which can be used to absorb excessive electricity at night and power trains by day, reducing curtailment costs by c. £16m per year. The same technology can also be scaled and applied to TfL underground, electric roads, and EV charging stations in cities and along the strategic road network
GRN: UKRI784
Period: 10/11/2025 to 10/11/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
The net-zero transition requires us to completely change the way we generate, convert and store energy, alongside a transformation in our chemicals industry away from fossil fuel-based feedstocks. Central to achieving this, are catalysts – which increase the energy efficiency of a reaction without being consumed themselves. Not only will entirely new catalysts be needed for novel chemical processes, but the performance of existing catalysts for sustainable processes must be improved to be competitive with the fossil fuel-based alternatives. On top of this, many current catalysts are based on scarce and expensive platinum-group metals. It is therefore imperative to develop a new generation of catalysts which are active, selective, stable and, where possible, made from earth-abundant elements. This project thus addresses a key challenge in catalyst development: the need for widely accessible methods for observing how catalyst surfaces change with reaction conditions. The lack of such methods limits the extent to which we can apply fundamental understanding of surface catalysis to engineer improvements in performance. The business-as-usual approach to catalyst discovery continues to rely on trial-and-error, where composition is empirically optimised through repetitive testing. To meet our net-zero targets, and minimize the global temperature rises, we do not have time for such inefficient approaches and it is essential that we can rationally design and optimise catalysts, based on underpinning knowledge of their surface chemistry under reaction conditions. X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) is amongst the most powerful probes of surface composition and chemistry and is already widely used in industry and academia for the post-mortem study of catalysts and other energy materials. However, apart from at a small number of specialised facilities, XPS must be performed under high vacuum conditions, severely limiting its usefulness for understanding the state of catalysts in their operating environment. We have recently demonstrated a novel reaction cell approach which enables XPS to be performed on catalysts under realistic operating conditions, based on electron-transparent graphene windows. This project will move this technology from a proof-of-concept design used at synchrotron facilities, towards a robust, versatile and user-friendly platform which can be integrated into conventional lab-based XPS instruments. The main objectives are to: • Develop a scalable method for manufacturing electron-transparent graphene windows. • Implement thermocatalysis and electrocatalysis reaction cells, with integrated pumping, heating and gas/liquid delivery that can be incorporated into lab-based XPS systems. • Perform demonstration measurements on key stakeholders’ materials under both thermocatalytic and electrocatalytic conditions. • Produce licensable IP to de-risk commercialisation and explore exploitation opportunities. The wide availability of this capability to industrial and academic researchers will be disruptive to the process of catalyst discovery and optimisation by enabling direct observation of structure—function relationships. Rational design instead of trial-and-error will significantly accelerate the catalyst development process. Delivering this capability in the UK will be a clear advantage to our catalysis, chemicals and energy industries, helping us retain international leadership in decarbonisation, as well as benefitting other fields including batteries, sensing, and corrosion. Developing this technology in partnership with a UK-based instrument manufacturer will help retain the UK’s world-leading position in materials characterisation
GRN: UKRI2110
Period: 01/01/2025 to 01/01/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
Foundation industries (cement, steel, glass, ammonia etc) are classified as hard-to-abate sectors due to the inherent high-temperature processes. Decarbonization of industry is technically possible through a combination of technical solutions, the optimum mix of which will vary widely between sectors and regions. Deep decarbonization technologies such as application of alternative carbon neutral fuels and carbon capture are essential to achieve the target of net zero by 2050 in the EU. The project aims to evaluate, develop and demonstrate the advanced and emerging technologies for sustainable energy transition and industrial deep decarbonization. Firstly, the project attempts to remove the barrier associated with high operational and infrastructure costs incurred by the traditional carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology applying aqueous scrubbing. The project also evaluates and justifies the potential of a negative CO2 emission solution by combining CCUS with biomass derived carbon neutral fuels (BECCS). In addition, the project aims to conduct a comprehensive feasibility study on the application of ammonia in selected industrial processes as an alternative carbon neutral fuel to replace fossil fuels. The project attempts to apply a wide range of research methods at different scales from microscopic material design to laboratory scale testing and pilot scale trials, and finally to industrial scale deployments supported by the industrial partners. Multi-scale modellings such as reaction kinetics modelling, CFD modelling and process modelling will be performed for system optimization. Techno-Economic Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment on carbon footprint of the full supply chain will be conducted for all three above-mentioned decarbonization pathways. Additionally, Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven approach will be used to predict the dynamic CO2 emissions from industrial sites under scenarios using different combinations of renewable fuels with CCUS
GRN: UKRI2112
Period: 01/06/2025 to 01/06/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
Foundation industries (cement, steel, glass, ammonia etc) are classified as hard-to-abate sectors due to the inherent high-temperature processes. Decarbonization of industry is technically possible through a combination of technical solutions, the optimum mix of which will vary widely between sectors and regions. Deep decarbonization technologies such as the application of alternative carbon-neutral fuels and carbon capture are essential to achieve the target of net zero by 2050 in the EU. The project aims to evaluate, develop and demonstrate the advanced and emerging technologies for sustainable energy transition and industrial deep decarbonization. Firstly, the project attempts to remove the barrier associated with high operational and infrastructure costs incurred by traditional carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology by applying aqueous scrubbing. The project also evaluates and justifies the potential of a negative CO2 emission solution by combining CCUS with biomass-derived carbon-neutral fuels (BECCS). In addition, the project aims to conduct a comprehensive feasibility study on the application of ammonia in selected industrial processes as an alternative carbon neutral fuel to replace fossil fuels. The project attempts to apply a wide range of research methods at different scales from microscopic material design to laboratory scale testing and pilot scale trials, and finally to industrial scale deployments supported by the industrial partners. Multi-scale modelling such as reaction kinetics modelling, CFD modelling and process modelling will be performed for system optimization. Techno-Economic Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment on the carbon footprint of the full supply chain will be conducted for all three above-mentioned decarbonization pathways. Additionally, Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven approach will be used to predict the dynamic CO2 emissions from industrial sites under scenarios using different combinations of renewable fuels with CCUS
GRN: EP/Z536180/1
Period: 01/09/2025 to 31/08/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
High performance computing (HPC) and corresponding CMOS chips used in large data centres today face two major challenges: (1) Energy: Achieving a low-energy, low-carbon, greener footprint is critical. It has been predicted that total energy consumed by data centres could increase 15 times by 2030, accounting for up to 8% of global electricity demand. It is crucial to develop new technologies that can drastically reduce HPC energy consumption by orders of magnitude. (2) Performance: Due to the difficulties in continuing the conventional scaling, particularly for power reduction, HPC improvement has dramatically slowed from 32 times per decade in the 1990s to only 1.5 times per decade, as up to 80% of transistors on the chip cannot be used simultaneously due to chip overheating. Power efficiency of logic technologies is limited by VDD, which cannot be scaled much below 0.8 V at room temperature, due to the large Vth and off-leakage imposed by the large sub-threshold swing (SS) of MOSFETs. Liquid nitrogen cooling can drastically improve the performance-to-energy ratio for greener data centres. The significantly reduced SS at cryogenic temperatures (CT) ≤77 K enables significant Vth and VDD scaling to ~0.1 V and 0.3 V, respectively, and delivers >7.5 times power reduction. DARPA recently called for ground-breaking innovations in cryogenic logic technologies and set the target of 25 times performance-to-power ratio (PPR) improvement. However, nanoscale devices operating at a low VDD near Vth are susceptible to logic and timing faults from false transistor switching on/off, induced by charging and discharging of a single defect. The risk of false switching is amplified by the steeper I-V characteristic at CT. Existing device fault and reliability modelling cannot be used under low VDD at CT where the probabilistic process dominates, because they are based on conventional deterministic methodologies. These models use the accumulation or average of multiple defects to set the failure criteria. They are overly pessimistic and force the designers to use the worst-case methodology and unnecessarily large design margins, which hinders the achievement of the 25X Cryo-CMOS optimization targets. Therefore, a novel probabilistic criterion of Fault Rate in Per Million Operations (FPMO) should be used to identify the lowest VDD at CT, instead. This project aims to break the bottleneck and fill in the knowledge gap of cryogenic power fault co-optimisation (PFCO) under ultra-low-VDD. SPICE-level compact modelling of probabilistic and quantum phenomena in defects and their correlations with random faults in devices and circuits will be developed, for achieving ultra-low power and ultra-low fault cryogenic HPC. The project is built on the holistic integration of three key research pillars and objectives to demonstrate the probabilistic PFCO technology and EDA tools at defects, devices, circuits, and system modelling levels: 1) Measure and characterise different probabilistic defects/faults at CT. 2) Develop probabilistic physical and compact device/fault modelling. 3) Demonstrate the new probabilistic Power and Fault Co-optimisation strategy. The integrated pursuit of the four WPs aims at delivering a major breakthrough deployable for HPC at low VDD and CT, through probabilistic fault modelling and Device-Technology-System co-optimisation for achieving unprecedented PPR, which is transformable for many other applications in low power design and green ICT technologies. The results will be implemented in cryogenic process-development-kits (PDK) and commercial design tools, and disseminated to leading industry and academia partners through collaborations with ARM, IBM, Synopsys, IMEC and Semiwise
GRN: UKRI1666
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/10/2030
Funding Source: EPSRC
Context: The REMODEL project seeks to revolutionise high-performance computing (HPC) applications for engineering modelling and simulation by advancing parallel mesh generation and geometry representation. As HPC continues to evolve, particularly with the advent of Exascale supercomputers, the need for precise and efficient simulations of complex engineering systems, such as jet engines and fusion reactors, has never been greater. Despite significant advances in simulating physical phenomena, current methods for handling geometries and generating high-quality meshes in parallel have not kept pace, posing a major barrier to the full utilisation of these powerful computational resources. Challenge: The project addresses the critical challenges impeding the adoption of high-fidelity modelling in industrial applications. These challenges include the difficulty of creating accurate geometric representations that can be efficiently processed in parallel, the lack of standardised parallel CAD formats, and the need for intelligent meshing tools that can predict optimal meshes for new geometries and conditions. Existing methods are often slow, require significant user intervention, and struggle with the dynamic and multi-scale nature of real-world problems. Aims and Objectives: REMODEL aims to develop cutting-edge algorithms and tools, new knowledge, enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of simulations, to drive the next generation of HPC systems. Key objectives include: Parallel Geometry Handling: Developing innovative methods for managing complex geometric and topological structures in parallel, ensuring accurate feature recognition and preservation. Hybrid and Adaptive Meshing: Creating adaptive meshing strategies that can handle evolving geometries and enable continuous adaptation for time-dependent simulations. Machine Learning Integration: Utilizing AI to enhance mesh generation and adaptation, reducing the need for iterative processes and ensuring optimal mesh resolution from the start. Multi-Physics Integration: Facilitating seamless, high-fidelity simulations that can capture the complexities of multi-physics problems on parallel platforms. Applications and Impact: The REMODEL project will have far-reaching implications for various industries, including aerospace, automotive, energy, and space exploration. By advancing the state of parallel mesh generation, the project will enable: Enhanced Simulation Accuracy: More precise modelling of complex systems, leading to better product designs and improved performance. Reduced Computational Overhead: Efficient use of HPC resources, minimising energy consumption and computational costs. Broader Industrial Adoption: The development of standardised tools and techniques that can be easily integrated into existing workflows, making high-fidelity simulations more accessible to a wider range of industries. This will stimulate the development of new products and services that contribute to national economic growth and sustainability goals. UK Innovation Leadership: By aligning with the UK's commitment to investing in Exascale computing, REMODEL will strengthen the nation's position at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation. Furthermore, the project will orchestrate meaningful collaboration and knowledge transfer between academia and industry. The consortia amalgamates internationally leading scholars, establishing a robust partnership that will serve as a platform for knowledge exchange, socio-economic impact, and the co-creation of future strategic projects. As part of dedicated engagement and outreach commitments, REMODEL’s outputs will be available as open-source libraries to support global reach, the team will actively promote visibility of the findings, engaging with stakeholders and launching a series of workshops, conferences, and a dedicated project websit
GRN: UKRI1119
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/10/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
Flows with large gradients of viscosity and density have recently been found to exhibit new unstable behaviours. New linear energy growths have been detected, suggesting the existence of novel routes leading to turbulence. Fundamental understanding and mathematical models of these new phenomena are currently missing: the physical origin of some instabilities is unclear as well as the conditions under which they may prevail. Hence, the range of physical parameters for which these flows are laminar or turbulent is unknown. Even less understood is how we may act on these flows in order to enhance or impede transition to turbulence. Such questions have great practical implications in engineering. Strongly stratified flows are found, for example, in power plants that use supercritical fluids – fluids at high pressure and temperature. Bridging those gaps will eventually enable the design of more efficient clean energy systems by leveraging the potential of supercritical fluids to exist in a turbulent state (thereby ensuring high heat transfer) even at relatively low flow rates. This project aims to develop a mathematical framework, based on resolvent analysis, that models the linear dynamics of strongly stratified flows. Resolvent analysis is a modern approach in fluid dynamics. It is particularly well suited to study transition to turbulence, as it allows the largest linear energy growths to be identified whilst informing on the optimal conditions that trigger these growths. No such framework currently exists for stratified flows beyond the Boussinesq approximation. Under this assumption, inertial baroclinic effects are neglected, making such models unable to represent instabilities in strongly stratified flows, as recently shown in the literature. The present project addresses this issue by deriving the resolvent analysis using the low-Mach approximation. Based on an asymptotic expansion in terms of the vanishingly small Mach number, a framework modelling arbitrary large density variations can be obtained. Establishing this set of equations for an arbitrary equation of state constitutes the first objective of this project. Developing a numerical tool that solves it is the second objective. This will be achieved by employing a classical spectral method and a singular value decomposition of the resolvent matrix. A thorough validation of this new code will be conducted against data from the literature. The third objective is to obtain results that will demonstrate the applicability of the approach to identify the non-modal mechanisms at play in a laminar strongly stratified flow. Preliminary results will also be obtained on turbulent mean flows. The development of this novel theoretical and numerical framework will benefit the fluid dynamics community interested in stratified flows. Beyond transition to turbulence, the versatility of resolvent analysis can unlock new avenues of research regarding turbulence modelling, as it provides an efficient approach to model coherent structures. These structures, which underpin the statistics of turbulence, have never been studied in strongly stratified flows. This could yield new insights into the modelling of turbulent heat transfer in supercritical fluids which, along with the development of a novel operational computational tool, have the potential to foster technological and knowledge transfers to industrial partners in the energy sector
GRN: UKRI3190
Period: 01/11/2025 to 01/11/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Introduction According to the UK Biomass Strategy published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in 2023, sustainable biomass use across the economy plays a vital role in achieving the ambitious target of net zero carbon emission by 2050. Aligned with The Biomass Strategy Policy Statement, widespread biomass use in the industrial sector provides a low-carbon alternative to conventional chemical synthesis, significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Sugar beet pulp (SBP), a major waste stream from sugar industries in the UK/Europe is currently sold as animal feed and its valorisation into more value-added products is essential to establish profitable SBP-based biorefineries. The proposal aims to design Yarrowia lipolytica-based cell factories to produce value-added chemicals (zeaxanthin and 1,4-butanediol (BDO)) from SBP, providing a sustainable route for the UK’s nascent bio-based industry. BDO, a tetracarbon diol, is an industrially important large-volume commodity with applications in the food, chemical, medical and pharmaceutical industries. BDO is used as a starting material for manufacturing different products including polybutylene terephthalate, tetrahydrofuran, γ-butyrolactone (GBL), and polybutylene succinate. Zeaxanthin is a naturally occurring carotenoid pigment and a potent antioxidant found in yellow vegetables and fruits, including corn, orange peppers, mangoes, pink grapefruit, apricots, etc. It has a wide range of applications, from colorants and antioxidants in the food industry to dietary food supplements and cosmetics. The consortium brings together the expertise of esteemed academics (Dr Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, and Dr Razieh Rafieenia, Imperial College, London, Dr Vinod Kumar, Cranfield University and Dr Ahsan Islam, Loughborough University) and industrial partners (C-Source Renewables, and FRUU Cosmetics) who will provide in-kind support. The project will apply systems/synthetic biology, metabolic and bioprocess engineering approaches coupled with machine learning algorithms to ensure industrial scale production of zeaxanthin and BDO. The proposed research is part of a wider vision to enable efficient use of all major monosaccharides in lignocellulosic-based waste streams with a circular biorefining approach. Research Aim & Objectives The overall aim of the proposed research is to design and construct Y. lipolytica-based cell factories by rewiring its metabolic network to enable the sustainable biomanufacturing of zeaxanthin and BDO from SBP. This involves achieving specific and measurable milestones: I) Machine learning-based design of optimised strain engineering strategies, II) Construction of L-arabinose and D-galacturonic metabolising Y. lipolytica strains, III) Bioconversion of L-arabinose and D-galacturonic acid into zeaxanthin and BDO by the engineered Y. lipolytica strains, IV) Scaled-up production of target chemicals. The potential direct or indirect benefits: The project outcomes will hugely benefit the current, unsustainable, fossil fuel-based chemical industries, as these are identified as the key and direct beneficiaries of the work through the availability of environmentally friendly products. The profound research investigation and investment in this area will strengthen the bioeconomy, improve the economic viability of bio-based industries including pharmaceuticals, and polymer industries, and create new employment opportunities in the UK from researchers to engineers and operators. The efficient bioconversion of lignocellulosic-based wastes into value-added chemicals will benefit the polymer and pharmaceutical industries by contributing to circular biorefining, leading to more sustainable and environmentally friendly bioprocesses. Additionally, the use of wastes as inexpensive raw material will result in reduced process costs and, subsequently, lower market price of the final products
GRN: EP/Z534237/2
Period: 01/05/2025 to 05/01/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Ion-exchange membranes (IEMs) are required for a diversity of applications across many fields spanning clean energy, environmental remediation, and healthcare. Examples include: green hydrogen producing electrolysers and low temperature fuel cells; carbon dioxide electrolysis into high value chemicals; salinity gradient power; hydrogen peroxide generation; redox flow batteries; actuators; batteries and supercapacitors; electrodialysis and diffusion dialysis for the recovery, extraction, and separation of inorganics including heavy metals ions and acid and bases; chromatography materials for protein purification; biomaterials for tissue engineering; and fouling resistant membranes for microfiltration. The Lancaster University team will develop a novel table-top facility using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) to routinely and non-destructively quantify the different states of water (bound, bulk, and free) in IEMs in environments with both relative humidity (RH) and temperature control. Previously, water states and contents have only been measured in uncontrolled environments using either pulse field gradient nuclear magnetic resonance experiments or with destructive techniques like differential scanning calorimetry. The developed THz-TDS system will be used to gain a more extensive TRL1-2 level fundamental understanding of how the states of water vary in IEMs with different composition characteristics. These IEMs will be either commercial types (including those provided by a project partner) or those fabricated at the University of Surrey (see below). Underpinning preliminary work at Lancaster University has shown that THz-TDS derived water state information can be collected at different RHs, but this was only possible at ambient temperatures. A more comprehensive development of a system, that can collect such data with both RH and temperature control, is required. Commercial ion-exchange membrane developers and users, including project partners, have indicated that they would like to see this knowledge deficiency rectified, where routinely collected water-state data is available over a wider range of conditions. Radiation grafting is a useful method for bulk functionalisation of polymers with defined characteristics (films, powders, fibres). The University of Surrey will supply a range of small-scale (10 × 10 cm) samples of radiation-grafted cation- and anion-exchange membranes with a diversity of: (1) ion-exchange capacities; (2) chemistries; (3) thicknesses, and (4) nano-morphologies (distribution and size of crystallites). This will aid the generation of new fundamental scientific knowledge related to how IEM characteristics affect their water contents and states. In the latter stages, the Surrey team will then conduct TRL3 scale-up work on down-selected radiation-grafted IEMs, an effort that will be supported by the developed Lancaster University-based THz-TDS capability. For initial translation to impact, the scaled-up RG-IEMs will be those that have the right balance of properties for application in peroxide generating cells, an interest of our aerospace partner. It is well known that the in situ performances of IEMs (in numerous electrochemical systems) is as much a function of water contents (and mobility) as they are of ion-conductivity. Hence it will be important to elucidate the homogeneity of the distribution of water states across different areas of scaled-up (30+ × 30+ cm) batches of IEM, as well as the consistency of water states across multiple repeat batches. It is currently unknown if homogeneous ion-exchange capacities actually lead to homogeneous water states
GRN: EP/Z001595/1
Period: 01/07/2024 to 30/06/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
The project 'Super High Power and Energy Electrode Designs for Metal-ion Batteries' (SPEED) is focused to demonstrate a sustainable 'Hybrid Battery' (HB) technology by combining materials which demonstrate different charge storage mechanisms in a single device, decoupling energy and power. High surface area materials store charge as an electric double layer capacitance (EDLC) and redox- active materials can store charge in the bulk particles, such as in batteries. If suitable green principles are used from concept through to end-of-life and recycling, the materials' life cycle can be optimised. SPEED will highlight the integration of renewable energy generation, emission reduction, e-mobility with improved resource efficiency targeted for the European Union (EU) aim of Net Zero by 2050. This novel concept has enormous potential to overcome the drawbacks of both supercapacitors and batteries such that high power and high energy density can be achieved in a compact system with improved charging rates. Sustainability will be addressed through materials choice, using abundant materials such as Aluminium, Sodium, Magnesium, Iron and Manganese rather than critical materials such as Lithium, Cobalt and Graphite. Multi-material concepts which combine the different surface area materials, and ion transport combinations will be used to maximise performance properties. High-charge aluminium ions will be used for high surface charge storage, whereas sodium ions for bulk charge storage. A lab-based prototype will be developed to underpin the fundamental understanding of hybridised technology for long-term industrial and emerging technologies. Devices fabricated using this composite will provide an enhancement in the frontiers of science & technology associated with the aim of clean energy usage leading to economic prosperity for all
GRN: UKRI634
Period: 01/11/2025 to 01/10/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
Context The discovery of high-temperature superconducting magnets has allowed the design for fusion devices to shrink considerably. Whilst this will result in large economic benefits, operating components in such a proximity to the reactor core only pushes them closer to the point of failure: containing a Sun in a box is no mean feat. “Saving Icarus” aims to increase the operating temperature of reduced-activation fusion steel using additive manufacture (AM) to design and engineer a microstructure that is stable at elevated temperatures. The connection enabled by this project This collaborative project brings together experts on AM and alloy design at the University of Cambridge (UoC) with the Materials and Fusion Technology divisions at the UKAEA. The alloy design will revolve around a spatially engineered microstructure concept, which is pioneered by the group at UoC and is enabled by AM. The goal of the project is twofold. First it will demonstrate the viability of using AM technology to improve performance and lower the cost of fusion applications. Second, it will showcase the benefits brought about by materials with spatially varying microstructure, which may have implications for different engineering problems. The challenge addressed Current reduced-activation ferritic-martensitic (RAFM) steel alloys proposed for use in plasma-facing components in the reactor core—such as breeder blankets—cannot operate at temperatures exceeding 550°C. Beyond this baseline, creep, thermal cycling, and radiation damage accumulation will cause failure and limit the lifetime of the reactor significantly. The UKAEA has identified a class of high-strength RAFM steels with finely dispersed nano-precipitates as a possible material solution to raise the operating temperature to 650°C. However, these materials are difficult to manufacture and assemble into large components. As a result, making breeder blankets out of these materials is costly and would require multiple weld joins, which irremediably compromise the alloy’s unique microstructure and introduce possible failure points. Aims and objectives This project will address the above challenges by enabling net-shape manufacturing of these advanced steels with spatially controlled microstructure using AM technology. The part design consolidation offered by AM will allow reducing the number of joints required to make large scale parts, lowering the production cost and ensuring safer operations. Moreover, site-specific ‘tuning’ of the alloy microstructure will be used to make parts with graded precipitate density; high in the hot, plasma-facing regions and absent in colder ones, which may be safely welded to other subcomponents. The objectives of this project are thus two: 1) demonstrating the printability of these high strength alloys with tuneable density of precipitates and 2) producing a demonstrator breeder blanket subcomponent with optimized microstructural gradient. Potential applications and benefits The adoption of advanced, near-net shape manufacturing technologies is a crucial step to realising commercially-viable power generating nuclear fusion reactor designs. As such, this manufacturing development will be of interest to a range of public and private organisations which are currently engaged in these designs. This represents an exciting opportunity for the UK to lead the energy revolution. As an indication of scale, the Fusion Industry Association reported that in 2023 the fusion sector global invested $1.4B, of which private sector operators raised $271M. Translation projects, such as Saving Icarus, are ideally positioned to feed into and leverage off this growing industrial opportunity
GRN: EP/X019055/2
Period: 01/11/2025 to 30/09/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
Up to 90% of the energy used over the lifetime of a ceramic component is consumed during manufacturing. The very high temperatures used are by far the biggest barrier to the wider use of ceramic materials, despite their suitability for use in a wide range of applications including solid-state batteries and other devices. In this project we will attempt to eliminate the need for heating to densify ceramic materials. We will start with pellets pressed from highly pure ceramic powders to which we will add very carefully controlled amounts of "phase-changing additive" substances which convert to metals at relatively low temperatures. This will provide us with a way to input energy by connecting the material to a power supply which will preferentially heat the surfaces of the particles where these substances are placed. We hypothesize that this will lead to intense heating in this region locally, enabling sintering to occur without needing to raise the temperature of the entire sample. This paradigm-shifting idea would radically reduce energy consumption in the ceramics industry and enable co-processing of ceramics with other materials which would usually degrade at the high temperatures of conventional ceramic processing methods. This work, if successful, will enable better manufacturing routes for important technological applications including solid-state batteries and ceramic-based metalized metamaterials for use in imaging and communication. In this project we propose several methods to investigate whether our hypothesis is correct and whether the effects we propose can be sufficiently controlled to lead to extensive densification. We will also investigate how universal the effects are by substituting materials with different ionic, electrical, and thermal conductivities. The project will also involve extensive work to characterise the samples produced using a wide range of imaging, X-ray spectroscopy, and bulk property measurement methods
GRN: UKRI773
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/10/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
The rapidly expanding field of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning exposes the limitations of conventional Von Neumann architecture. Neuromorphic computing, inspired by the highly energy efficient functionning of the brain, has emerged as a solution for efficient unsupervised learning, particularly relevant qith the advent of edge computing and visual computing applications. Solar cell-inspired materials, offering persistent photoconductivity allowing to simulate synaptic plasticity, have the potential to revolutionise neuromorphic visual computing. The SOLIS project forms an international consortium of experts from photovoltaics and materials science to explore inorganic thin film materials' potential as artificial visual synapses. These materials, tuneable and stable, promise reliable optically controlled MEMRISTORS suitable for diverse light intensities and wavelenghts. The collaboration, emphasising staff exchanges and transparent sharing of data, methods and persons, aims to reinforce our understanding, innovate with materials like 2D MXenes, and establish a shared framework for optoelectronic characterisation of visual synapses. The project aligns with Europe's objective to catch up in the field of AI and possibly become a leader in hardware-level machine learning, offering opportunities for scientists from Third Countries and EU countries alike. SOLIS will be an important milestone for EU research and the PV field as a whole, unlocking new applications for inorganic thin film materials and offering a paradigm shift toward visual computing and AI free from the constraints of current materials and architectures
GRN: UKRI1107
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/04/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
Developing more energy-efficient technologies is a key component of sustainable economic growth. Superconductors can make a key contribution to such technologies, however their ground state is typically only reached at very low temperatures. Only one group of materials, the cuprate high-temperature superconductors, so far exhibits superconductivity at temperatures above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen and at ambient pressure, which has made it challenging to develop a universal understanding of the pairing mechanism in these materials. Recently, superconductivity at similarly high temperatures has been reported in a second class of transition metal oxides, the lanthanum nickelates, albeit so far only under pressure. Discovery of a second class of transition metal oxides that exhibits high temperature superconductivity promises new opportunities to establish an understanding of the pairing mechanism in these materials and vastly better possibilities their properties in applications. The lanthanum nickelates are structurally very similar to the cuprates: they are both perovskite oxides, and superconductivity is observed in layered compounds of the Ruddlesden-Popper (RP) series – suggesting that similar physics might be at play. The primary objective of this research proposal is to systematically investigate the ground states of RP type phases derived from lanthanum nickelates in a quest to stabilise the superconductivity at ambient pressure as well as establish their correlated phases and understand their origin. To be able to harvest this potential high temperature superconductivity, but also improve our understanding of and ability to design correlated phases in transition metal oxides, we propose here an approach that combines thin film growth with characterisation by spectroscopies and electronic transport and ab-initio modelling to identify the key physics, enable identification of the superconducting phase, and unravel the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity in lanthanum nickelates. To achieve this objective, we will Use advanced spectroscopic methods to understand the electronic structure and correlated phases of single crystals of lanthanum nickelates Establish growth of electronic designer metamaterials, consisting of layered structures of different members of the Ruddlesden-Popper series of the lanthanum nickelates Employ a range of methods to identify the superconducting phase and stabilise it in thin films at ambient pressur
GRN: UKRI2576
Period: 02/11/2025 to 02/11/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
Context: Climate change and new technologies like AI are having unprecedented impacts on the performance of critical engineered systems like infrastructures. For example, surges in the demand for electric power can exacerbate the impact of devasting floods and storms that can then wreck power grids. Coastal erosion disrupts railroads and impact transport and supply chains. The UN SDGs stress the urgent need for next generation infrastructures to make better use of resources, sustain economic activities, and recover readily from major disruptions. These are essential to face global societal challenges like climate change and transition to net zero. Challenge: Standard tools for designing and planning complex engineered systems (electrified transports, renewable energy systems, space-based remote-sensing) are poorly suited to deal with uncertainty in environmental conditions, markets, technologies and societal needs. Tools and measures of performance like optimization and benefit-cost analysis typically rely on deterministic forecasts that cannot deal with uncertainty or the value of strategic adaptation in the face of unforeseen conditions. They often lead to rigid systems that are insufficiently resilient, inefficient in terms of resource use, or cannot provide the originally intended societal value for money. Our ability to address complex global challenges like climate change is at risk if upcoming investment decision-making continues to rely on existing approaches. Aims & objectives: This OTG will push further the development of an emerging paradigm called Strategic Engineering, which promotes design & planning of complex systems like infrastructures to dynamically adapt and reconfigure to deal with uncertainty and risks. Many years of research show that strategic engineering produces systems with improved economic value for society, better sustainability, and resilience in the long run. This OTG will support travels to enable in-person meetings and workshops with colleagues in the US and Europe who have contributed to the development of this emerging paradigm. The objectives are to 1) continue development of an educational eBook presenting concepts and theories underlying strategic engineering and how to apply the methods and measure benefits in sectors like aerospace, defence, energy, transport, 2) research and co-develop new data-driven and AI technologies to better disseminate knowledge in engineering education and practice, and 3) contribute to grow a global community of researchers and practitioners to maximise impact and momentum in view of a follow-on EPSRC Network Plus proposal. Potential applications & benefits: Latest research shows that strategic engineering produces engineered systems with improved economic value for society (20-30% routinely compared to standard tools, significant for infrastructures typically requiring >£100 million investments). Strategic engineering is a unifying paradigm promoting sustainable use of economic and material resources via dynamic adaptation, as well as resilience in the face of uncertainty. As such, it supports global business and policy aspirations for a cleaner and greener future. The tools, methods and technologies developed over the years are, however, not widely accessible to engineering students, academics and practitioners. This is because the knowledge is highly cross-disciplinary and fragmented, and our community spread out across many institutions. This OTG will help consolidate our efforts to produce innovative, open access and accessible educational and research material for future engineering and system leaders. Crucially, it will support society’s ability to adapt to a changing world at a time when it is most needed
GRN: UKRI2575
Period: 01/09/2025 to 01/09/2030
Funding Source: EPSRC
Rising ambient temperature, changes in precipitation and extreme weather events are observed more frequently recently. Buildings should be designed and retrofitted to withstand these changes and extreme events during their lifetime. Resilience of buildings has attracted attention of research and design guidance in particular for heatwaves and flooding. In addition, cities create their own microclimate. There is considerable drive in many cities to improve quality of air and thermal environment outside. On the thermal environment, current research and initiatives focus on how to mitigate the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI) by increasing vegetation, reflectivity (albedo) of external surfaces, and incorporating water features. These interventions will help reducing external air and surface temperatures improving thermal comfort of pedestrians and reducing energy demand for cooling buildings. Urban settings and climate change both impact on energy use and thermal comfort inside buildings as well as Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in naturally ventilated buildings. At design stage, external boundary conditions are an important input to predicting their performance and at operational stage knowledge of external conditions helps to adjust settings. Designing buildings especially in urban environments using typical (based on past data) weather conditions ignores the changed external environment leading to erroneous predictions and choice of façade design and Heating Ventilation and Air conditioning (HVAC) strategies and equipment that may not be suitable. Considering the drive to achieve net zero buildings in the next decade, ignoring the urban environment and climate change will compromise the results. The new International Energy Agency (IEA), Energy in Buildings and Communities (EBC) Annex 97 research project aims to generate and spread international knowledge about effective heat mitigation and sustainable cooling in cities considering their characteristics and impact of climate change. Emphasis will be placed on the interaction between heat mitigation in outdoor spaces and cooling of buildings. Therefore, the project aims to develop and support the application of measures that serve the health, safety and wellbeing of people and that push energy efficiency and open the way to carbon neutrality. The objectives are: establish a knowledge base on environmental quality criteria in indoor and outdoor spaces, as well as key performance indicators (KPIs) for urban cooling. develop simulation and experimental methods to assess heat mitigation and cooling technologies. identify and assess solutions to improve heat mitigation in urban outdoor areas and cooling in buildings, focusing on the interrelation of both measures. identify best practices for policy-making, and strengthen existing networks to amplify global adoption of sustainable cooling practices. Annex 97 participation includes research organisations from 20 countries, including many European countries, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan and the USA while India, Mexico and Vietnam will be observing countries. Brunel intends to participate to the work of all objectives. Participation will benefit the UK in identifying additional niche areas for research at national level and promoting current national research at international level. The results of Annex 97 will be of benefit to regional policy makers, urban planners, architects and building designers. The Annex will publish reports of the international research which are approved by the IEA EBC Executive Committee before publication and will be available in the IEA EBC website. In additional, interim results will be published in the form of journal and conference papers
GRN: UKRI2572
Period: 01/09/2025 to 01/09/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Quantum mechanics is often thought of in the context of highly controlled laboratory experiments and complicated theoretical calculations. Yet, its principles also govern everyday natural processes. As a consequence, quantum correlations—phenomena like coherence and entanglement that have no classical equivalent—may be the key to dramatically enhancing their efficiency. Hence, this project is devoted to uncovering the hidden potential of quantum mechanics with a particular focus on energy transfer in molecules. Central to our research is the process of singlet fission, where a molecule absorbs a single photon creating an excited state which then divides into two quantum mechanically linked electronic states. This process has the potential to facilitate more efficient charge transfer—a critical step in converting light into electricity. However, despite its significant promise, the intricate mechanisms underlying singlet fission remain largely unexplored, presenting both a challenge and an exciting opportunity for research breakthroughs leading to step changes in technology. Understanding singlet fission poses a dual challenge that intertwines theoretical and experimental obstacles. On the theoretical side, traditional quantum chemistry methods often fall short in capturing the rapid, complex, and non-equilibrium dynamics intrinsic to singlet fission, e.g., where coherence or entanglement play a crucial role. On the experimental side, unraveling the dynamics demands specialized spectroscopic techniques capable of simultaneously resolving both electronic and spin effects over a broad range of timescales. Moreover, the gap between the sophisticated theoretical frameworks of quantum information science and the practical constraints of experimental chemistry is a formidable barrier that this project will overcome: We will integrate cutting-edge modeling with state-of-the-art spectroscopy to achieve a unified understanding of singlet fission. To tackle the challenges outlined above, our project brings together a team with wide-ranging expertise in quantum chemistry, quantum information, open quantum systems, spectroscopy, and synthetic chemistry, to capture the intricate dynamics of singlet fission and the subsequent charge transfer processes. We will develop a novel theoretical framework that combines state-of-the-art quantum chemistry with open quantum systems theory, which will be rigorously tested using cutting-edge ultrafast optical and magnetic resonance spectroscopies on specially-synthesized molecules engineered to exhibit singlet fission. By directly observing the quantum behaviour that drives these processes, we will gain unprecedented insights into optimizing energy transfer and pioneer the integration of quantum information techniques with advanced chemistry research. The potential applications of this research are extensive. A deeper understanding of quantum correlations in singlet fission could lead to the development of next-generation solar cells that significantly exceed current efficiency limits. In addition, these insights may inform the design of photocatalysts and other optoelectronic devices, contributing to more sustainable energy solutions. Beyond immediate technological applications, integrating our new methodology with advanced spectroscopy and chemical synthesis will foster interdisciplinary collaboration, bridging the gap between quantum information theory, chemistry, and materials science, and thereby enriching the broader research community. In summary, our project will combine quantum chemistry with quantum information theory through open quantum systems theory with backing and grounding in experimental measurements to advance fundamental knowledge of quantum dynamics in molecular systems. More, we aspire to translate these insights into practical applications to lay the groundwork for transformative technologies in renewable energy and quantum-enabled devices, ultimately addressing critical challenges in energy conversion and sustainability
GRN: EP/Z536271/1
Period: 01/08/2025 to 31/07/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The electric vehicle (EV) market is growing at an unprecedented rate. EV drivelines face unique operational and reliability challenges to reduce energy consumption, increase vehicle range, and switch from oil-based lubrication. EV lubricants face significant challenges operating inside electromagnetic fields that damage surfaces by electric discharge and changes molecular interactions at the surface. They need to lubricate under severe conditions, from low-speed high-torque to super-high speeds and angular accelerations typical of EV operation. Lubrication is in boundary-to-mixed regime where surface contact occurs, so forming protective tribofilms is paramount. Switching to aqueous lubrication has benefits to the environment, health, and increased cooling (increasingly as both lubricant and coolant combined), but brings significant challenges in film formation and corrosion. How tribofilms form and evolve in the electro-aqueous environment is fundamental to their operation. This project aims to provide fundamental understanding of aqueous EV lubricant performance and create a framework for performance prediction in real applications, thus enabling development of appropriate sustainable lubricants. This includes mechanistic and deterministic models and novel experiments at different scales - the formation of tribofilms at molecular level, single asperity and contacts, and then to full-size bearing components. We have designed four work packages, each for a different length scale. In WP1 we investigate commercial and prototype fluids in an electrified full-size bearing, exploring tribofilm formation, surface damage, and failure mechanisms. A component (bearing) level simulation model, built simultaneously, will incorporate contact analysis, thermo-hydrodynamic and boundary film formation. In WP2, single contact level testing is performed in bench-top simulators to closely control the contact between rolling and sliding parts, watching for tribofilm and damage mechanistic evolution, with and without potential. WP3 considers the single asperity, using AFM experiments, to study tribofilm composition and how it builds atomically at the contact. This is complemented by the molecular dynamics simulations in WP4, studying the adsorption of the candidate molecules to form boundary films and the effect of electric fields. These are then upscaled to film formation at contact and bearing scale. The team consists of three world-leading tribology groups with complementary expertise. Loughborough have a long track record in tribodynamics, including EV transmissions. Imperial College leads the field in development of lubricant additives, transmission technologies, and modelling at all scales. Sheffield specialises in machine element experimental measurement and sensing. The industrial partners span the supply chain and are committed as this aligns with their business needs. Shell will support with their expertise in lubricant design, supply of fluids, access to test equipment, and fund a PhD. SKF will support with expertise in bearings, effect of electric potentials, as well as specialist equipment and PhD funding. Scania will provide data on EV drive cycles, and expertise in performance of EV drivelines. AVL will provide access to their simulation tools and dissemination to their customer base. The output from the project will be a complete methodology for design and selection of aqueous lubricants for electric vehicles. This will be adopted by our industrial partners and more widely into automotive and lubricant sectors
GRN: UKRI915
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/10/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Organic (carbon-based) semiconductors are leading to a more sustainable future in electronics. What sets organic based electronics apart is their cost-effective production through easy-to-use printing methods. They are also mechanically flexible and lightweight, making them ideal for unconventional device shapes. Additionally, these devices can be energy efficient, contributing to reducing power consumption, aligning with the goals of a sustainable energy landscape. The applications of organic electronics are diverse, including energy-efficient displays and low-cost photovoltaics for renewable energy generation. I specialise in optical spectroscopy and device physics of organic semiconductors. In my approach to research, I believe that merely understanding the potential of a molecule in isolation is insufficient. It is crucial to consider the context of the molecule within its environment and the diverse behaviours relevant to the timescales and energy-scales present in a functioning device. By integrating these considerations into opto-electronic models, we can facilitate more effective material and device design, thereby optimising their performance and functionality. Although organic based devices are already successfully incorporated into commercial products such as Samsung smartphones and LG TVs, their full potential remains untapped. For example, we have yet to develop stable blue high-performance organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) or electrically driven organic lasers. These advancements are hindered by a fundamental lack of understanding of exciton (electron and hole pair) dynamics within operational devices. Current research relies on photoexcitation (light) to probe exciton dynamics, which explains very well exciton dynamics in thin films. However, this method does not fully replicate true device operating conditions. The discrepancy arises because the excited states generated in electronic devices differ significantly from those induced via photoexcitation, primarily due to variations in the spin of the excitons generated. Therefore, a paradigm shift is needed in the study of exciton dynamics to unlock the potential of organic based devices. My proposed project will develop exciton dynamics models under actual device operational conditions and link these to performance and degradation of organic based devices. The project will study OLEDs using a novel device characterization methodology and currently available electro-optical techniques to unravel fast processes occurring in devices. The primary scientific outcome is to uncover key insights into how organic based devices operate. This involves understanding the mechanisms of exciton generation and emission in OLEDs. Specifically, I aim to obtain critical exciton parameters such as spin, energy, efficiency, and lifetime directly from the devices. By analysing these parameters and assessing their effects on OLED performance metrics (like efficiency, colour purity, and lifespan) we will be able to establish new guidelines for designing materials and devices. Moreover, this program will delve into device engineering methods for controlling exciton degradation mechanisms, which must be mitigated to realise significant breakthroughs in the field, such as stable blue high-performance OLEDs and electrically driven organic lasers. These achievements will impact direct industrial applications, especially in the development of displays that consume less power. Finally, I highlight that grasping the fundamentals of these emitting devices will yield broader implications for other organic based technologies. For example, sustainable organic solar panels currently face challenges on reducing non-radiative charge and exciton recombination which is critical to achieving high-performance conversion from light to electricity. This project holds the potential to ultimately understand this obstacle, promising advancements in the realm of solar energy technology as well
GRN: UKRI1300
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/10/2030
Funding Source: EPSRC
As other sectors of industry decarbonise, and if current trends and technologies continue, aviation will be responsible for 39% of the UK’s total carbon emissions by 2050, up from 8% in 2021. Rolls-Royce is committed to achieving net-zero operation of all its products by 2050. There are three pillars to its strategy: (a) maximise the efficiency of current products; (b) ensure fleets are compatible with 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF); and (c) develop alternatives such as electric and hydrogen propulsion. Fully electric flight is not suitable for long haul operations, for which hydrogen has been identified as a viable zero-carbon solution. VECTA’s ambition is to realise a unique Exascale multi-physics capability for modelling complete hydrogen gas turbines with the requisite resolution to credibly capture and remedy emergent behaviours. Our vision is that these capabilities contribute, in no small part, to the introduction of safe and efficient hydrogen powered gas turbines. VECTA builds on the highly successful “ASiMoV Round 2 Prosperity Partnership'” and takes it to a new level, with both new physical and computational modelling challenges. The project consortium, which like ASiMoV is led by EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh, together with Rolls-Royce, also includes the universities of Cambridge, Warwick, Surrey and Queen's University Belfast, as well as two further companies, ITI and Turbostream
GRN: UKRI2414
Period: 13/10/2025 to 13/10/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
This proposal puts forward a combined experimental and computational study to investigate and precisely assess the wall similarity hypothesis for a broad class of non-equilibrium rough-wall turbulent boundary layers. This issue is crucial to the application of RANS CFD to a vast array of practically relevant flows and to the prediction of separation, drag, performance, flow-induced vibration and noise. The work will combine state of the art experimental capabilities and experience at Virginia Tech, with leading edge computational expertise at the University of Cambridge. In addition to conclusively resolving key scientific issues and bringing new insight into the physics involved, the work will engage and train researchers at the postdoctoral, PhD, undergraduate and high-school levels, enable cross-cultural and interdisciplinary international exchanges, and provide unique research experiences for hundreds of undergraduate engineers
GRN: UKRI2560
Period: 01/10/2025 to 01/01/2027
Funding Source: ESRC
The transition to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 requires an acceleration of advances in fundamental science that will have a pragmatic impact on critical technologies. The high level of research on hydrogen materials for hydrogen storage over the last decades has led to significant breakthroughs in fundamental science. Climate change now calls for a re-focus of the hydrogen material science to translate the properties of these materials toward superior and pragmatic solutions needed beyond just storage to across the hydrogen supply chains. Light transport decarbonization can be tackled through electrification, but hydrogen remains an option to decarbonize the hard-to-abate sectors such as heavy-duty transport, off road vehicles, marine and aerospace. However, implementing hydrogen as a clean energy vector has challenges in other related technologies such as compression, sensing, purification, storage and distribution of hydrogen. In this project, we focus on the challenges associated with hydrogen compression. Due to its low density, hydrogen compression is required along the entire supply chain from production to end use. A wide range of hydrogen compression technologies have been investigated, and the most common hydrogen compressors on the market are based on mechanical compression, such as reciprocating, diaphragm, linear, and ionic liquid compressors, which are costly to purchase upfront and consume high levels of electricity to run, typically requiring 20-30% of the calorific value of the hydrogen to compress hydrogen to high pressures to 700 bar and beyond. The operating cost of mechanical hydrogen compressors is high due to the requirements of constant and significant maintenance, particularly for valves, packing, and piston rings. The potential for an alternative technology such as metal hydride compressors is significant offering opportunities for compressing hydrogen using waste heat from electrolysers or other renewable sources (e.g. solar thermal) delivering high efficiency. Metal hydride compressors do not require moving parts in the compression process, and have, therefore, much lower operational cost and significantly enhanced reliability and safety. The vision of this joint UK-Japan project is to address challenges associated with one of the main bottlenecks of developing efficient metal-hydride hydrogen compressors, i.e. identifying the optimal metal hydride materials for hydrogen compression that can be used with sustainable heat. This will be accelerated by a combined experimental-computational approach as well as the combination of the research expertises and facilities on hydrogen storage materials of the University of Nottingham and the AIST Tsukuba supported by the ICMPE (Paris) and the Sandia National Laboratory. By this approach we will be able to identify optimal metal alloy compositions that can be utilised to compress hydrogen gas from 20~30 bar (produced by an electrolyser using renewable energy sources such as wind and solar) to high pressures, e.g. > 700 bar for hydrogen refuellers via multiple hydride combinations, or 80 bar for hydrogen pipelines via a single stage metal-hydride compressor. As experimental data is very limited and in parts very difficult to obtain, to accelerate the metal alloys discovery, we need to combine a wide range of experimental and computational techniques, including atomistic materials modelling, materials synthesis, and materials structure and hydrogen storage property characterisations using a one of a kind high pressure Sieverts apparatus. The best candidate metal alloys on hydrogen compression applications will be scaled up and tested in our in-house multi-stage prototype metal-hydride compressor device
GRN: UKRI1577
Period: 01/05/2025 to 01/04/2026
Funding Source: ESRC
This project aims to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms of damage initiation in advanced rail materials and how the microstructure of the materials affects this. This project will be undertaken in collaboration with The Royce Institute leveraging their world-leading expertise and equipment investment in materials characterisation and has been developed following introductions to their Tescan And Newtek In-Situ Testing (TANIST) facility during the Metallics CDT conference. The Royce Institute’s state-of-the-art facilities, including Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) and in-situ Digital Image Correlation (DIC), will provide unparalleled in-situ data on the evolution of microstructure and crack initiation and growth, at a scale not seen previously in the development of rail steels. The proposed research aligns perfectly with the focus of this call on advanced materials and its commitment to supporting collaborative research. Within standard grade rails, wear and RCF are critical challenges limiting the lifespan of rail infrastructure, incurring substantial economic costs (£3.9bn on renewals in 2021/22), carbon costs and hindering railway capacity increases. Previous approaches to extending standard grade (R260) railway track component life include regular maintenance, such as grinding, which is conducted to maintain rail profiles (preventive), to keep contact conditions optimum and to remove damage such as cracks (corrective). Advanced rail steels, such as heat-treated grades (350HT), high performance alloys (e.g. HP335) and laser clad coatings (e.g., Martensitic Stainless Steel (MSS)) offer a significant leap forward in rail infrastructure, offering a promising solution to the financial and safety critical challenges of rail wear and rolling contact fatigue (RCF). Although railways have been around since the 1800s every advance in materials is met with an increase in demand (speed, axle loads, drive to reduce maintenance need), so these remain live issues that limit transition to a low carbon transport future. Most recently, advanced rail materials with refined microstructures which provide a harder material with greater resistance to deformation and crack initiation, but they have not resolved the underlying issues. This project will provide a better understanding of the way in which the intricate microstructure of these materials respond to services loads and the consequent damage initiation mechanisms such as white etching layer (WEL) from grinding. This will allow further material design improvements to create rail, which is more durable, easier to maintain and ultimately more sustainable. Collaboration with The Henry Royce Institute will enable novel in-situ testing within the scanning electron microscope (SEM) with High resolution digital image correlation (HRDIC) to provide an in-depth study of the microstructure of advanced rail materials using novel techniques for rail development. Through the study of the behaviour of the microstructure of advanced rail materials with EBSD, nanoindentation and in-situ SEM with HRDIC, visualisation of strain fields will be possible for the first time which will help our understanding of how the grain size and orientation affects deformation. As advanced rail materials are developed it is critical to understand how the refined microstructure behaves with common damage mechanisms to design against current problems. This project will explore the potential of laser-clad additive repair to extend the lifespan of advanced rail materials. By applying a targeted area of like-on-like material, we aim to optimise the microstructure and ensure the repaired region is as durable as the original material whilst avoiding weakness at the interface of different materials
29/10/2025
39 new projects added
GRN: UKRI664
Period: 01/02/2025 to 01/02/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Quantum computers offer an unprecedented computational advantage over classical ones, which could revolutionise medicine, energy and security. However, to achieve sufficient robustness required for such applications, we need to accurately control a large number of tiny particles at the quantum level. Current generation of quantum computers cannot meet their full potential due to control errors and decoherence, hindering their applications in science and technology. A milestone in the theory of quantum computing was achieved with the discovery of quantum error correcting codes. These algorithms allow to correct errors without measuring or destroying the logical quantum information. Nevertheless, practical implementations of quantum error correction require a huge overhead of resources, making them prohibitively costly in real-world applications. This proposal takes an alternative approach of protecting quantum information from errors and decoherence by harnessing the cutting-edge phenomena in condensed matter physics, in particular the exotic properties of particles known as non-Abelian anyons. Anyons have rich topological properties that can simultaneously protect quantum information and process it in an error-free way, thus promising to realise the ultimate goal of fault-tolerant quantum computation. This proposal will take advantage of the Project Lead's recent success in the quantum simulation of non-Abelian anyons with photonic systems and turn it into prototype fault-tolerant quantum computation devices. The project is very timely as these experimental advances were realised only in 2023, yet questions of how to use them for quantum computation remain open. This proposal will take these initial breakthroughs and create concrete blueprints for topological quantum computation based on the currently available technology. We will achieve that by strengthening our established collaboration with the experimental group of Prof Mehul Malik and by initiating a collaboration with the quantum technology company Aegiq. Anyons have interdisciplinary significance spanning statistical mechanics, condensed matter, and topological quantum field theory, all of which will be impacted by our results. Beyond advancing fundamental science, the success of this project will ensure the UK experimental groups and industry remain at the forefront of leveraging topological properties of anyons to ultimately deliver more robust quantum computers
GRN: UKRI639
Period: 29/08/2025 to 01/03/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
Polymers play a vital role in our daily lives and we continuously encounter polymers that are specifically designed and optimised for optimal performance. They are present in various aspects of our lives, such as clothing, computer displays, and medical technologies. However, in order to maintain a sustainable and healthy society, we need advanced solutions that offer higher performance and new capability that are affordable. They could also pave the way for innovative materials that open doors to new medicines, advanced lubricants, organic photovoltaics, and lithium battery matrix technologies. Living anionic polymerisation is a highly precise chemical synthesis technique that can be used to make these polymers, allowing for an array of molecular architectures. However, there is a lack of efficient methods to quickly screen polymers synthesised using this technique. Currently, it is only carried out in specialised laboratories equipped with the necessary infrastructure and skilled personnel to meet the rigorous experimental conditions. Due to this, scientists will make only one or two batches of material per week meaning rapid prototyping is impossible. Here, we will develop a platform technology which facilitates synthesis of polymers by LAP using an automated reactor platform which can maintain precise conditions with minimal human input. By equipping this instrumentation with machine learning capability, we will demonstrate an ability to rapidly screen polymers and demonstrate the ability to scale-up whilst maintaining the precision required. This technology will precipitate an array of opportunities for developing new sustainable materials which can contribute to solving challenges facing society
GRN: UKRI1337
Period: 01/08/2025 to 01/08/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
Buildings are responsible for about 40% of carbon emissions and consume about 40% of all produced energy in the UK. Transforming how buildings use and produce energy is a fundamental steppingstone to achieving net-zero carbon emissions and sustainable economic growth. The abundance of data, flexible technologies and advanced control approaches open exciting opportunities to achieve cost-effective system decarbonisation and create places where people love to live for the increased comfort standards. A radical transformation of the building sector is possible using real-time monitoring, learning capabilities, advanced control strategies, distributed optimisation and coordination. Our research demonstrates that the energy consumption of buildings has a vast potential to be flexible and support an efficient grid operation. However, it is unclear how to design distributed control architectures and schemes managing millions of buildings in real-time to simultaneously achieve societal and individual consumer benefits. The proposed project seeks answers to critical open questions: How can we efficiently harness the adaptability of millions of diverse buildings to support the entire energy system while optimizing individual objectives concurrently? How can we harness data reliably to develop scalable, transferable control methods, bringing them closer to practical application? The aim of this research is to develop distributed solutions to reliably manage energy use across groups of buildings. We will consider for the first time the advantage of dynamically forming coalitions according to the environment's variability and individual real-time energy needs. To realise this, we have set the following objectives: 1. Extend the latest data-driven behavioural control and uncertainty modelling approaches, state-of-the-art distributed optimisation methods and reinforcement learning techniques. These methods should be scalable to bridge the gap between lab-scale demonstrations and real-world implementation. 2. Apply these innovative methods to models of building clusters. This will offer insights for shaping policies and driving innovation, bolstering their role in supporting the entire energy system. The close collaboration with UK Power Networks and SSE Energy Solutions will support the data-driven modelling and development of novel adaptive distributed control architectures to maximise the research output impact. A pressing question we will address is how to achieve both individual and societal benefits. Existing distributed solutions are focused on directly achieving a centralised objective. Such solutions do not fit the objectives of simultaneously achieving societal and individual objectives. Substantial performance limitations arise when pursuing exclusively conflicting objectives, since the buildings connected to the grid are strongly coupled.
GRN: EP/Z002532/1
Period: 01/06/2025 to 30/11/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
The proposed project, “CATALYSE”, will develop, and maintain long-term collaborations between Europe, China, South Africa, and Nigeria towards renewable dimethyl ether (DME) fuel production from CO2. This objective will be achieved through joint research in new process systems and material development in direct air capture (DAC) and utilisation. This requires skills and knowledge inexperimental study, process modelling, analysis and optimisation, computational material design and catalysis which will be strengthened by the individual mobility of researchers between Europe and the participating countries. There are 14 partners involved in CATALYSE who are world-leading in their respective areas of which there are 3 industrial partners. CATALYSE will start in January 2025 for 48 months. There will be 25 experienced and 32 early-stage researchers to participate in 330 person-month exchange visits. A total of €1.52m funding is requested to support the planned exchange activities. The European partners are experts in process modelling and optimisation, process intensification, computational material design, catalysis, and CO2 utilisation while the Chinese partners are experts in process intensification, green hydrogen production and DAC. The South African partners are experts in DAC and sustainability assessments while the Nigeria partners are experts in renewable energy and green hydrogen production. Knowledge transfer and training will take place through the planned secondments. We will generate at least 30 Journal publications and 30 conference papers. In addition, 2 Special Issues will be published in leading journals such as Applied Energy, 2 Workshops and 2 Special Sessions at major international conferences will be organised to disseminate project results
GRN: EP/Z536106/1
Period: 01/09/2025 to 31/08/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The demand for titanium dioxide (TiO2), a critical opacifier and pigment across multiple industrial sectors, is expected to reach 8 million tonnes in 2025. Because of the energy-intensive manufacturing processes involved, such production will lead to the emission of a staggering 40 million tonnes of CO2. In this project, we aim to develop hollow polymer particles that have a lower carbon footprint and can fully replace titanium dioxide in a wide range of formulated products, taking paints and coatings as a case study. We will synthesize a range of hollow polymer particles with tailored size, polydispersity, shell thickness, outer surface roughness, and inner surface chemistry. Tuning these variables will enable us to take a two-pronged approach, not only optimising the properties of the hollow particles themselves but also their interaction with other formulation ingredients. Through this approach, after introducing the particles in coatings formulations and drying them into films, we will be able to control their final distribution and correlate it with the coating's optical, thermal, and mechanical properties. Moreover, we will accelerate their industrial implementation by conducting a life cycle assessment and trialling them in full paint formulations in collaboration with our industrial partner. Although we have chosen paints and coatings as case study, as they represent 55% of the global TiO2 consumption, the new additives would be relevant to a wide range of film-forming formulations. These include inks, adhesives, sealants, personal and home care, and cosmetics. Thus, our work will catalyse a transformative shift towards more sustainable practices across diverse industry sectors by providing a viable alternative to TiO2
GRN: UKRI1161
Period: 01/01/2025 to 01/01/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) describe the locally averaged mass interaction of large numbers of constituent elements – be they molecules, cells, organisms, or devices. Controlling such processes allows us to create lift over the wing of an aircraft, synthesize new chemicals and materials, and regulate combustion in power plants. The design of controllers for such processes, however, is difficult due to nonlinear interactions and a spatially distributed state. Specifically, our reliance on digital computers has traditionally required lumping of this distributed state into a fixed number of parameters representing discrete points in the state or weighted averages of the state. Lumping allows us to use sophisticated algorithms for the analysis and control of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) such as the Sum-of-Squares (SOS) framework for polynomial optimization. However, these methods require sophisticated mathematical analysis, limiting their use in speculative and data-based PDE models. Furthermore, lumping fails to capture discrete-continuum effects such as shock, fluid-structure interaction, and boundary inputs. As a result current algorithms for the analysis of nonlinear PDEs suffer from difficult implementation, low reliability, high complexity, and questionable physical interpretation. Recently, new methods have emerged for the analysis and control of linear PDEs which do not discretize the state but instead parameterize operators which act on this state – The Partial Integral Equation (PIE) framework. This approach has worked well for linear PDEs where we can parameterize linear operators using multipliers and kernels – resulting in efficient universal software tools for rapid analysis, control and simulation. For nonlinear PDEs, however, there is no obvious parametrization of nonlinear operators on a distributed state. The goal of this project, then, is to develop efficient convex algorithms for analysis of nonlinear PDEs by combining the SOS and PIE frameworks. We then demonstrate their accuracy and reliability using models of fluid flow and demonstrate their use for speculative and data-based PDEs using plasma confinement in Tokamak nuclear fusion reactors. The main contribution of this project is to propose a new multiplication algebra of polynomials on a distributed state and to parameterize that algebra using linear operators. We then adopt the fundamental state transformation used in the PIE framework to strip out partial derivatives and boundary conditions – representing the dynamics of the PDE using distributed polynomials (a nonlinear PIE). Next, we generalize the SOS approach to parametrization of positive polynomials by using positive linear operators to parameterize positive distributed polynomials. Global stability and input energy gain can then be tested by searching for polynomial Lyapunov functions whose derivative is likewise a distributed polynomial. The results are extended to local stability by generalizing positivstellensatz results from semialgebraic geometry. To obviate the need for sophisticated mathematical and computational expertise in nonlinear PDEs, we will develop a universal software tool PIESOS (modelled after the SOSTOOLS and PIETOOLS software packages) for: conversion of nonlinear PDEs to nonlinear PIEs; manipulation and optimization of positive distributed polynomials; and stability/energy gain analysis of nonlinear PDEs. PIESOS will have a user-friendly interface for declaring nonlinear PDEs and return provable certificates of stability and input energy gain. Furthermore, this software will use efficient data structures, sparsity, and Newton polytope methods to reduce computational complexity well below that needed by standard SOS-based lumping methods. Finally, the accuracy and reliability of the results will be demonstrated by application to nonlinear PDE fluid flow models
GRN: EP/Z53657X/1
Period: 01/08/2025 to 30/04/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The Liverpool City Region (LCR) is a critical hub in the UK’s transport and logistics network, comprising one of the largest ports in the country, extensive multimodal transport systems, and strong connections to both domestic and international markets. The LCR transport cluster includes maritime, road, rail, air, and inland waterway infrastructure, making it an important node for the movement of goods and people. Given its strategic importance, ensuring the resilience of these transport systems against potential crises is essential for maintaining the continuity of national and international supply chains. The proposed project, CRDT-Port, aims to enhance the resilience and operational efficiency of these critical infrastructures. By focusing on the LCR as a primary case study, the project seeks to develop a digital twin framework that can be scaled and adapted to other port-centric regions across the UK. The LCR transport cluster faces multiple risks that could significantly disrupt transport operations and supply chains. These risks include severe weather events, infrastructure failures, cyber-attacks, public disorders, and global supply chain interruptions. The complexity and interconnectivity of these transport systems mean that disruptions in one area can have cascading effects across the entire network, impacting both the regional and national economies. Traditional methods of managing these risks are often reactive and lack the predictive capabilities needed to anticipate and mitigate disruptions effectively. The challenge lies in developing a comprehensive and proactive approach that can integrate diverse data sources, model complex scenarios, and provide real-time decision support to stakeholders during crises. The CRDT-Port project aims to develop a DT tailored specifically for the LCR transport cluster, with potential applications in other port-centric regions in the UK. The project will integrate real-time data from multiple sources, including maritime traffic, road and rail networks, weather conditions, and logistics data, to create a detailed and dynamic representation of the transport systems. It will also develop models that simulate potential crisis scenarios, such as extreme weather events, infrastructure failures, cyber-attacks, and supply chain disruptions. These simulations will evaluate various mitigation strategies and provide real-time decision support for crisis management. Another objective is to enable seamless collaboration between different systems and stakeholders (energy, telecommunications, electricity), ensuring that the DT supports secure, real-time decision-making during crises. Our target is to design the DT framework to be scalable, allowing it to be applied to other UK ports and national infrastructure nodes. The CRDT-Port project offers significant benefits for both the LCR and the broader UK transport network, as well as other sectors. It will enable stakeholders to anticipate and prepare for disruptions, minimising their impact on transport operations and supply chains. By providing real-time data and predictive insights, the CRDT will enhance decision-making during crises, helping stakeholders respond more effectively and reducing the risk of prolonged disruptions. While initially focused on the LCR, the scalable framework will be applicable to other port-centric systems across the UK, contributing to a more resilient national transport infrastructure. This project will protect the economic activities linked to the LCR, ensuring the UK's strong position in global trade, and establishing the UK as a leader in digital twin applications for infrastructure resilience
GRN: UKRI2108
Period: 01/07/2025 to 01/07/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The accumulation of plastic wastes is a severe environmental challenge. Present estimates suggest that over 380 Mt plastics are produced annually worldwide, only 16% are currently recycled, while 150-200 Mt plastics are accumulated in landfill or leaked to the natural environment. On the other hand, the global demand for carbon-based chemicals and materials is expected to double in the next 10 years to over two billion tons, which we cannot simply still rely on sourcing from fossil fuels. We need to supply these feedstocks from recycling waste materials, such as plastics. However, until now, there remains significant challenge in bridging the gap between waste management and the resource demand for materials and commodity chemicals. The ultimate way to overcome this challenge is to close the loop by recovering the monomer feedstocks from waste, yet such chemical recycling cannot be easily achieved by traditional thermo-chemical processes, due to the poor tolerance to feedstock contamination, low economic value of products and sizable energy input. On this aspect, mechanochemistry, which utilises mechanical energy to initiate chemical reactions, has clear advantages over traditional thermochemical processes. These advantages arise from reactions taking place in a solventless, solid-state environment, with a high tolerance to variation feedstock qualities. Historically, this technique solely relies on supplying enough energy input to overcome the thermodynamic energy threshold of the chemical reactions. Yet plastics are made to last, therefore the polymer chemical bonds are difficult to break. Therefore, capitalising on the team’s strong background on catalysis and polymer processing, through building collaboration with the mechanochemical community in the UK, CirPla will demonstrate for the first time how catalysis + mechanochemistry can transform the plastic recycling and manufacturing sectors. The catalysts will decrease the activation energy of the polymer chain bond breaking, while mechanochemical conditions supply the energy required to drive the depolymerisation reaction. The effectiveness of this process will be demonstrated with a model plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET, beverage bottles), with the scope of expanding to other plastics, such as polyamides and polycarbonates, in future studies. By collaborating with the world-unique EPSRC-Resonant Acoustic Mixing research facility led by Prof. Tomislav Friščić in University of Brimingham, CirPla will push the frontier by: 1. Design effective nanoscale catalysts for maximum product yield; 2. Benchmark mechanochemical systems at different scales for up-scaling assessment; and 3. Understand reaction mechanism for further material and catalyst discovery. This research theme aligns with the UKRI’s strategic theme of “building a greener future”, Innovate UK Circular Plastics Network (UKCPN), and Materials and Manufacturing Vision 2050. Aiming to translate the research discovery for impact delivery beyond the project, CirPla is also closely linked with waste management company (Chambers) and the process manufacturing centre of excellence (CPI), for further technology scale-up and validation. When successfully developed, this new process has the potential to transform the plastic value chain and push towards 100% recycling rate. By sourcing the carbon feedstocks from waste stream as fossil fuel alternatives, it will also facilitate the decarbonisation and defossilisation of the chemical sector, thereby contributing towards a climate neutral circular economy
GRN: UKRI858
Period: 01/04/2025 to 01/04/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The FleXEdge project is focused on accelerating and reducing the cost of the net-zero transition by unlocking demand flexibility at scale from grid-edge devices including electric vehicles, electric heating, and smart appliances. Specifically, the project aims to address the computational bottlenecks which currently prevent electricity system operators from fully utilising grid-edge flexibility as a potentially major resource for local and national power system balancing. The electrification of transport and heating are key components of the UK and EU net-zero strategies. Over the next decade, millions of electric vehicles and heat-pumps will be deployed within local distribution networks. To manage this transition, all six UK distribution network operators are trialling local flexibility markets which can incentivise coordination between grid-edge devices to manage distribution network constraints and increase the hosting capacity for renewables and electric transport/heating. Ofgem's ambitious future vision is for local flexibility markets to support the widespread coordination of grid-edge flexibility, not just for managing local power flows, but also to provide national flexibility services. Research by the investigators and others has shown that grid-edge flexibility could be highly valuable if integrated into electricity system operation across spatial scales (local feeders to national transmission) and timescales (months- to seconds-ahead flexibility services). However, realising this value requires fundamental research gaps to be overcome related to the computational challenges of large-scale near real-time coordination and local-national flexibility market integration. FleXEdge will address these challenges through a research programme into the design and national integration of local flexibility markets, crossing disciplinary boundaries between distributed AI-based coordination, market mechanism design, and cloud-to-edge computing. The project will deliver scalable machine learning methods for coordinating grid-edge flexibility, linked with incentive mechanisms which reward grid-edge device owners for the power system value of their flexibility and data. These will be underpinned by a new computing architecture targeted at the domain-specific challenges which have previously limited the use of distributed AI for power system control applications. The methods and tools that are delivered will be valuable for electricity system operators and flexibility aggregators, as well as the wider energy research community. National case studies for Great Britain and Luxembourg will be completed to quantify the overall potential value of the new designs and to develop policy recommendations for market reforms which could unlock additional value. The project is a collaboration between Dr Thomas Morstyn at the University of Oxford, Dr Pierre Pinson at Imperial College London, Mr Davy Virdee at EPCC (the University of Edinburgh's centre for high performance computing and data science) and Dr Jun Cao and Dr Pedro Rodriguez at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). EPCC will provide state-of-the-art computing facilities and engineering expertise in optimising, scaling, and deploying data-intensive scientific software. LIST brings aligned capabilities in AI-based edge computing and hardware-in-the-loop testing. The project is supported by industry partners in the UK and Luxembourg, including power system operators (National Grid ESO and SP Energy Networks), smart grid technology providers (Piclo, Siemens and Typhoon HIL), and the Energy Systems Catapult, which supports energy sector collaboration, innovation, and policymaking
GRN: UKRI640
Period: 08/09/2025 to 08/03/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
Advanced composites have been used extensively in high performance lightweight applications ranging from aerospace, automotive to renewable energy sectors, with a global market of composite products over £60bn by 2017 together with a compound annual growth rate of 7% since 2011, and a projected £10bn growth in sales of composites in UK industry by 2030. However, with the ever increasing demand for zero-impact and sustainable development, the environmental impact of each stage from composite production to their end-of-life options should be considered to take the advantage of this high growth rate in the composite sector. Three important questions remain for the clean growth of the sector: (1) how can we manufacture the composites in an environmentally sustainable way, i.e. reduce the energy consumption for the rapid growing production needs; (2) how to effectively reduce, recycle, and reclaim valuable materials from end-of-life composite wastes; (3) how to truly reveal the lightweight feature of composites and reduce the overdesign in composites while avoiding unexpected catastrophic structural failures. This project will address all three questions by materials and manufacturing innovation, creating a circular economy for the composite industry by providing an extremely energy efficient and intrinsically safe manufacturing method based on recycled composite wastes as new functional fillers. With only 1% of energy consumption compared to current manufacturing methods, high performance composites with integrated new functions like deformation and damage sensing as well as de-icing will be manufactured without needs of even an oven. This new method will be tuned to fully comply with the processing requirements of existing high performance composite systems, reducing costs in capital investment, operational, and maintenance aspects. The new functions will also provide real-time health monitoring of components' structural integrity to enable condition based maintenance with high reliability. This research will be supported by a strong joint force from both academia (WMG, University of Warwick, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US) and UK industry (ELG Carbon fibres Ltd, and LMK Thermosafe Ltd), with leading expertise from polymer and nanocomposite processing, smart composites, to carbon fibre recycling and intrinsically safe heating applications, to ensure a great success of the project and a large impact on relevant research fields, as well as a direct contribution to addressing the UK Grand Challenges of "clean growth" and "future of mobility" and international competitiveness of the UK economy, with world leading development in lightweighting in transportation, manufacturing and efficient use of resources
GRN: EP/Z536283/1
Period: 01/08/2025 to 31/07/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Electrospun composite cathodes combining inverse vulcanised sulfur polymers can contribute to fully exploit the potential of lithium sulfur batteries by combining the high surface area from the electrospun 1D nanofibres with the inclusion of high sulfur content copolymers, enabling faster charging rates, using a fully scalable processing technique. In a comparison with commercially available lithium-ion batteries for mobile applications, lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries exhibit a high theoretical specific energy of 2600 Wh/kg, at least three times higher than the current lithium ion battery technology, making it a great contender for high energy applications in mobile devices. Yet the use of Li-S faces major hurdles, which stem from sulfur's lack of processability and insulating nature, as well polysulfide shuttle effect, all of which leads to the loss of capacity and degradation of the lithium anode through the formation of lithium sulfide. My fellowship will address these issues by using spinnable sulfur-rich copolymers in combination with conductive carbon particles and a stabilising high molecular (bio-) polymeric carrier to a non-woven fibre mat, which can be directly used as a cathode in a lithium sulfur battery without the need to making an ink to deposit onto a current collector. The interaction with the surface area of the electrospun fibres will result in an outstanding high electrochemical active surface area, while providing a stable matrix from the fibrous structure that prevent polysulfide shuttle effect. I envisage the new developed Li-S batteries to display initial capacities >1300 mA h g-1 and capacity retention of > 80% after 100 cycles, compared to current Li-S batteries with conventional sulfur electrodes which exhibit capacities of 300–500 mA h g–1 and capacity retention < 50% after 50 cycles. The outcome of this research will contribute significantly to advancing Li-S battery technology. Moreover, these new electrodes will be fully recyclable and there are plans within the fellowship to conduct life cycle assessment to explore the feasibility of the recycling process as well as technoeconomic analysis of the newly developed cathode materials. Additionally, as I develop the new electrodes, I plan to substitute some of the carbon components by biomass waste materials, such as lignin, which I have extensive experience working with. In preliminary experiments, I have demonstrated the feasibility of producing sulfur-based fibres as cathode in a Li-S battery. This fellowship takes the research to the next level which involves further tailoring of the fibres and optimisation of the conductivity for optimal application as electrode, including their application in Na-S batteries, too. I believe this project will have a positive impact in the battery community and beyond. Sulfur co-polymers have shown to exhibit outstanding capabilities in domains such as mercury capture from aqueous solutions, application for which freestanding fibre mats with large surface area would be highly beneficial
GRN: EP/V037234/2
Period: 01/03/2025 to 31/03/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
Among the designs of advanced nuclear reactors being investigated worldwide, one concept holds a particular promise to make significant impact and address the global needs for clean energy sources in the near future - the molten slat-cooled high-temperature reactor, also known as Fluoride slat-cooled High-temperature Reactor (FHR). Unlike traditional Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs), the FHR uses solid fuel, which simplifies the concept greatly and can speed up its development and deployment. The advantages of FHR reactors over the current LWR designs and their economic benefits were highlighted in the AGRESR project concluded in 2021. Even though FHR concept presents many advantages in simplicity (when compared to molten slat-fuelled reactors), safety and economics, a significant amount of development is still needed. The concepts pursued elsewhere require substantial investment in the development of new fuel, core design and materials. Therefore, taking advantage of existing technologies and experience can substantially reduce the time needed to develop and deploy a salt-cooled reactor. Previous work explored the possibility of adopting features from the British Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors (AGRs) to speed up the development and commercialisation of FHRs. AGR development in the UK suffered from notable initial challenges, but the resulting product was an impressive fleet of nuclear reactors, which remains unmatched in its availability and efficiency. Thus, borrowing knowledge and expertise gained in years of AGR operation and their implementation in FHR is an attractive proposition. Recent analyses showed that the best performance of an AGR-like FHR system is achieved in configurations with only a small amount of graphite in the core, and, possibly, no graphite at all. This finding implies substantial deviation from typical AGR fuel geometry and core layout affecting the behaviour of the system. Therefore, several questions remain to be addressed, which will form the scope of this proposed project. It was shown that power density of the core can be substantially increased, allowing to produce more power from the same for or significantly reduce the core. Small modular AGR-like FHR core design has never been attempted. The previous fuel cycle analysis used simplified assembly models. Therefore, the findings would need to be confirmed on a more realistic full core level. It would be required to identify and analyse the most relevant limiting accident scenarios for the new core in order to make a compelling safety case. Unlike AGRs, the new system operates at nearly atmospheric pressure, suggesting that refuelling procedures can be simplified. Currently operating AGRs do not refuel at full power. This is partly due to concerns over vibrations and coolant flow redistribution among the neighbouring channels introduced by the fuel assembly extraction. Demonstrating possibility of refuelling at full power would be a major advantage of the new system. The changes in the core configuration mean that many questions related to salt fluid dynamics need to be addressed through experimental investigation. These, for example, should include evaluation of pressure losses imposed by support grids and those due to deposits and corrosion of surfaces which can change its roughness. These effects need to be quantified for different flow regimes. Finally, alternative fuel and coolant options can be explored. For example, metallic and dispersed particles fuels as well as coolants other than traditional FLiBe salt can offer many performance advantages
GRN: UKRI913
Period: 24/07/2025 to 24/07/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Fusion reactors have the promise to provide high quantities of power with zero carbon and greenhouse gas emission during generation. In addition to major, international initiatives such as ITER, recent years have seen a proliferation of small and mid-size enterprises presenting innovative approaches to fusion generation. Unlocking the capabilities of fusion power can form a key component of addressing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal Number 7 “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” and Goal Number 9 “Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation”. The research proposed here seeks to address a question of key importance in developing fusion reactors: What controls plasticity in refractory metals? This understanding will unlock the development of rationally designed alloys that can form key components in a fusion reactor? A key component of a tokamak is the divertor, which is located near the base of the tokamak and extracts heat and ash produced by the fusion reaction, minimizes plasma contamination, and protects the surrounding walls from thermal and neutronic loads. As such the diverter must withstand extremely high temperatures of over 1000 C at steady state, power densities of ~20MW/m2 and substantial neutron irradiation while maintaining its shape and structural integrity. The materials that can withstand such conditions are based on refractory metals, with tungsten being the preferred candidate due to its low activation and excellent sputtering resistance. Most refractory metals, including tungsten, are brittle at low temperatures but can become more ductile at higher temperatures. The temperature associated with this activation is known as the brittle-ductile transition temperature (BDTT) which can be above room temperature and make such materials unusable as a structural component. Alloying can improve the ductility of refractory metals at low temperatures, but there is little rational understanding of why this occurs. The proposed work brings together capabilities at two UK universities (Oxford and York) and one Japanese (University of Tokyo) to finally unlock a rational explanation of refractory metal ductility by directly imaging dislocation core structures. The key new technology that has unlocked the ability to image the screw dislocation is a combination of aberration correctors in electron microscopy allowing a very high semi-angle of convergence in the probe forming optics combined with the emerging technique of 4D-scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM). The depth of field of an optical system varies inversely proportionately with the square of the numerical aperture, and so the high convergence angles allowed by the latest generation of aberration correctors leads to a very low depth of focus at nanometre scale. This reduced depth of field can be used to focus on features at specific depths in a sample – an approach known in light optics as optical sectioning. Samples produced and with initial characterisation at Oxford will then be examined at high resolution using unique instrumentation at Tokyo guided by simulations and data processing algorithms developed in work led by York. The aim is to develop a rational understanding of tungsten plasticity to guide the development of alloys to enable the formation of a key component in fusion energy
GRN: EP/Z536209/1
Period: 01/06/2025 to 31/05/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Semiconductor photonics is at the forefront of a revolution in modern optoelectronics and is driving innovation in key technologies such as telecommunication, sensing and quantum. At its core is nonlinear semiconductor photonics which harnesses the strong instantaneous nonlinear optical responses that the materials afford. This functionality can be leveraged to process and transmit data, presenting the opportunity to significantly enhance the speed, capacity, and energy efficiency of next-generation optoelectronic systems. Furthermore, semiconductors can have a second-order nonlinear response which plays a crucial role in emerging technologies like quantum computing and quantum communication, where the controlled generation and manipulation of photons is essential. The significant majority of important applications of semiconductor photonics have been demonstrated in bulk noncentrosymmetric crystals or planar silicon waveguide platforms, which is problematic for their integration with the backbone of the information age, the optical fibre. This multidisciplinary and collaborative project sets a new agenda by engineering the convergence of three important research themes, optical fibres, perovskites, and semiconductor photonics. Unlike silicon, perovskites have a highly tunable crystal structure, making them very interesting for photonics. They can be direct bandgap, can contain a second-order nonlinearity many times higher than the state-of-the-art and can possess an extraordinary third-order-optical nonlinearity that is orders of magnitude greater than silicon. Furthermore, unlike more traditional semiconductors, the materials can maintain these properties when designed to have a wide bandgap, which is important for optical transparency and avoiding two-photon absorption. By establishing a single-mode, lead-free, perovskite fibre platform a new generation of semiconductor nonlinear photonic devices will be enabled. Devices will be demonstrated that require orders of magnitude less power to operate, that can access important second-order nonlinear processes, and that are immediately compatible with existing optical fibre infrastructures and architecture. This new class of optical fibre for nonlinear optics, quantum optics and telecommunications is anticipated to radically alter the functionality of optical fibre technologies
GRN: UKRI663
Period: 01/02/2025 to 01/02/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Context and current state-of-the-art: This co-created, business-inspired, fundamental research aims to enable Tokamak Energy Ltd (TE) to develop and improve fusion reactor centre-column designs by understanding the effect of irradiation, intense plasma-exposure and high-heat flux (HHF) on advanced shielding materials degradation. This partnership, with a long-term vision of contributing to fusion commercialization efforts, will be delivered in active collaboration with world-leading fusion centres in the EU, and further guided by a steering committee comprised of subject-matter experts from the US and the UK. Meeting net-zero emissions by 2050, as outlined by the Net Zero Government Initiative, requires green innovation technologies such as fusion energy which promises carbon-free, safe, secure and abundant power. The UK-based TE aims to demonstrate commercial fusion in the 2030s by combining its spherical tokamak design with rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) high-temperature superconducting magnet technology, thereby, opening a pathway for smaller more compact power-plants. Key to success is a robust “centre-column” design, a life-limiting component comprising of REBCO coils. However, these magnets are highly susceptible to radiation damage and heat. Smaller power-plants offer limited shielding volumes, necessitating high-performance advanced shielding materials, with a thorough understanding of their fusion-relevant in-service degradation phenomena. This is critical to enabling TE’s commercial spherical tokamaks. Key Challenge: Fusion in-vessel conditions are severe – high neutron bombardment (>100 displacements per atom, dpa), a wide temperature range (cryogenic in magnets to >1000 °C), intense plasma particle exposure (>1019 ions.m-2.s-1 of D,T, He, impurities etc.) and HHF (tens of MW/m2 to several GW/m2 during disruptions). Given these synergistic challenges, the primary shielding candidates for TE’s centre-column are novel ceramic shielding materials: reduced-activation binder tungsten carbide (rab-WC) and di-tungsten pentaboride (W2B5), which are protected by potassium doped tungsten (K-doped W) in the plasma facing regions. Shielding failure in-service would result in failure of the centre-column. But little is known regarding in-service degradation of these materials, over their wide envisaged operating temperature range from cryogenic to >750 °C, which is a major design-limiting challenge. Project Aims/Objectives: To make progress towards the overarching goal, the following short-term objectives, to be completed within three years, are proposed: Understanding radiation-induced degradation of ceramic shields from cryogenic to 800 °C (rab-WC, W2B5). Quantifying the effect of plasma exposure and HHF on K-doped W and rab-WC. Preliminary HHF testing of W-WC joints. Baseline neutronic and Multiphysics assessment of damaged shielding materials to guide a preliminary centre-column design using data from (i), (ii) and (iii). Applications and Benefits: By enabling TE to develop robust fusion in-vessel component designs guided by materials degradation knowledge, this study will (i) enable the UK to be a global leader in the technologies needed to decarbonise our economies and transition to net zero, and (ii) directly support the UK’s plan for bringing about a Green Industrial Revolution by commercializing fusion energy technology. By building partnership with the University of Birmingham, which has notable fusion materials expertise, and coinvesting in discovery science and engineering, TE stands to become a world-leader in fusion energy, placing the UK at the forefront of the fusion landscape and benefiting the wider UK economy
GRN: EP/Z535904/1
Period: 01/05/2025 to 30/04/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Technologies based on electrochemical flow systems are emerging as promising more-sustainable solutions for the global challenges of climate change, materials availability and clean water supply. They offer opportunities to meet the goals of the UK’s “Net Zero” strategy, through development of improved energy storage and improved electrochemical recycling of mineral and water resources. Electrochemical flow technologies are underpinned by a common operational mechanism, where performance is simultaneously governed by electrochemistry and hydrodynamics (flow, diffusion and convection), and share common electrochemical processes, that establish internal concentration gradients which are coupled with mass transport. While there is increasing interest in developing electrochemical flow technologies, their advancement, and ultimate commercialisation, is inhibited by a lack of understanding of the fundamental processes controlling them, limiting their improvement, optimisation and ultimately, their commercialisation. In this project, we will develop advanced characterisation techniques, based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to non-invasively, holistically and simultaneously observe and quantify the interplay between electrochemistry and flow for the first time. These characterisation techniques will enable direct and simultaneous identification and localisation of species and depletion/reaction zones, while mapping diffusion and flow velocities of electrolytes/electrodes, in multivalent metal ion flow batteries, redox flow batteries and flow-electrode capacitive deionisation. The proposed project will design, construct and optimise flow cells and establish a suite of imaging protocols to study electrochemical flow systems. The development of these cells and imaging protocols will be guided by a range of test systems, pioneered by researchers developing electrochemical flow technologies. Systems will be selected, initially, from amongst those studied by our project partners, but will extend to systems beyond these, which are being advanced by researchers in the wider community. This project will deliver transformative insight into the behaviour and optimisation of a range of electrochemical flow systems, leading to an acceleration of their development. Our initial focus will be on redox flow batteries, multivalent metal-ion flow batteries and flow-electrode capacitive deionisation. However, the goal of the proposal is to not only advance these initial systems/technologies, but to develop the characterisation tools required to advance all electrochemical flow technologies. Our methods will be applicable to a diverse range of electrochemical storage systems, as well as electrochemical recycling of metals and other critical elements/materials, organic electrosynthesis and flow synthesis. Working with our project partners, we will ensure the MRI technique developments are guided by the applications. Building on the network of electrochemical researchers established in this project, we will engage with the wider electrochemistry, energy storage and sustainability communities, disseminating technical and scientific knowledge, and ensuring these techniques become more widely employed and accessible beyond the NMR and MRI communities. Therefore, this project will enable the establishment of novel operando flow cells and imaging protocols to advance our understanding of all electrochemical flow systems, the acceleration of technological innovation of electrochemical flow technologies through greater understanding of the fundamental molecular processes underpinning these more-sustainable electrochemical applications for the future, the creation of a national network of researchers developing electrochemical flow technologies, accelerate the UK's progress towards New Zero.
GRN: UKRI564
Period: 27/08/2025 to 27/08/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The proposed project, CATALYSE, will develop, and maintain long-term collaborations between Europe, China, South Africa, and Nigeria towards renewable dimethyl ether (DME) fuel production from CO2. This objective will be achieved through joint research in new process systems and material development in direct air capture (DAC) and utilisation. This requires skills and knowledge in experimental study, process modelling, analysis and optimisation, computational material design and catalysis which will be strengthened by the individual mobility of researchers between Europe and the participating countries. There are 14 partners involved in CATALYSE who are world-leading in their respective areas of which there are 3 industrial partners. CATALYSE will start in January 2025 for 48 months. There will be 25 experienced and 32 early-stage researchers to participate in 330 person-month exchange visits. A total of 1.52m funding is requested to support the planned exchange activities. The European partners are experts in process modelling and optimisation, process intensification, computational material design, catalysis, and CO2 utilisation while the Chinese partners are experts in process intensification, green hydrogen production and DAC. The South African partners are experts in DAC and sustainability assessments while the Nigeria partners are experts in renewable energy and green hydrogen production. Knowledge transfer and training will take place through the planned secondments. We will generate at least 30 Journal publications and 30 conference papers. In addition, 2 Special Issues will be published in leading journals such as Applied Energy, 2 Workshops and 2 Special Sessions at major international conferences will be organised to disseminate project results
GRN: UKRI1106
Period: 01/09/2025 to 01/09/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
This research aims to develop a new type of material that can store hydrogen in a safe and efficient way at near-room temperature. Hydrogen is a clean and renewable energy source, but currently, it is difficult to store and transport in large amounts. By using a combination of two different materials, we aim to create a high-capacity storage material that can be used in hydrogen fuel cell systems, which are a type of clean energy technology. We will use advanced techniques to understand how this new material works and how to improve it. The goal of this research is to make hydrogen a more practical and accessible energy source, which would have a positive impact on the environment and energy system. This project has the potential to create significant advancements in the hydrogen value chain and have global implications for the future energy system
GRN: UKRI1162
Period: 01/01/2025 to 01/01/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
The sustainable generation of green hydrogen is a critical challenge in our transition towards net zero. Artificial photosynthetic systems based on photocatalytic particles in suspension offer one of the potentially lowest cost routes to green hydrogen production using sunlight. However the limited visible light absorption of most photocatalytic systems to date, typically based on metal oxides, has to date limited achievable conversion efficiencies. Recently, substantial breakthroughs have been achieved in the performance of photocatalyst particles based on organic semiconductors, harnessing solar light across the visible and near infrared. However to date efficient hydrogen generation has only been achieved in the presence of sacrificial electron donors. In this project, we will focus on the development of organic heterojunction photocatalysts with controlled nanomorphology and their integration into a hybrid organic / inorganic tandem system for green hydrogen synthesis from water without any sacrificial species. The project brings together the expertise of the Durrant group at Imperial in the spectroscopy and photochemical function of photocatalytic systems with the McCulloch group's expertise in the design and synthesis of organic semiconductors. It further benefits from the participation of two talented researcher / co-investigators, Dr Soranyel Gonzalez Carrera (Imperial) with expertise in nanoparticle processing and photocatalytic characterisation and Dr Catherine Aitchison at Oxford with expertise in templating strategies for organic photocatalysts. The project will focus on the synthesis, characterisation and optimisation of visible / near IR absorbing organic heterojunction photocatalyst nanoparticles. Optimised nanoparticles will be tested in a tandem Z-scheme configuration with facet engineered Bismuth Vanadate particles supplied by our project partner, Prof Can Li from the University of Dalian, in order to achieve overall water splitting. Two strategies will be explored to fabricate heterojunction nanoparticles: i) blended organic heterojunction nanoparticles of selected donor polymers matched with molecular acceptors, using our established nanoemulsion solution processing technique and ii) templated covalent organic framework heterojunctions formed through our novel templating technique of D/A polymer sheets. Both systems will be functionalised with a molecular proton reduction catalyst to maximise selective proton reduction to H2, with nanomorphology and surfactant control used to optimise selective oxidation of a reversible FeII/FeIII redox couple. A core element of this project will be in-depth photophysical characterisation on timescales from fs to seconds, allowing us to determine the timescales of charge separation, recombination, and transfer to the proton reduction catalyst and FeII/FeIII, enabling iterative optimisation of each of these steps and thereby overall photocatalytic performance. Optimised photocatalysts will be selected on the basis of their efficiency for hydrogen generation and their stability, and then integrated into an overall water-splitting Z-scheme system with the BiVO4 water oxidation photocatalysts. The project has thus three specific objectives: -Development of organic semiconductor heterojunction photocatalysts with optimised (nano)morphology, high (photo)stability and selective proton reduction / FeII oxidation -In-depth mechanistic studies using advanced transient optical spectroscopies to identify the key performance descriptors and iterative materials design guidelines. -Optimisation in a Z-Scheme tandem system by integrating organic heterojunction photocatalyst for hydrogen evolution with BiVO4 oxygen evolution photocatalysts using a redox couple to achieve overall water splitting with STH efficiency of >1 %
GRN: EP/Y007778/2
Period: 02/09/2025 to 01/07/2026
Funding Source: EPSRC
One of the main challenges in delivering the decarbonisation of the built environment is represented by the high embodied carbon of concrete, the main used construction material. Due to the thermochemical processes involved in the preparation of Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC), the most common type of cement used in the sector, concrete has an average embodied carbon of about 300 kgCO2/m3, out of which more than 95% attributable to OPC, whose production is responsible for ~8% of global CO2 emissions. Globally, about 12-14 billion m3 of concrete are produced annually, using about 4.2 billion tonnes of ordinary Portland cement (OPC), whilst its consumption in the UK is about 15Mt/year. A common decarbonation strategy consists of partial substitution of OPC with supplementary cementitious materials (SCM), whose chemical composition (presence of Ca, Si, and Al) and physical structure (mainly amorphous) support the reactions involved in the cement hardening. The UK consumption of SCM is about 4Mt/year. Commonly used SCM are by-products from other industrial processes, mainly slag from steel production (ggbs) or ash from hard coal combustion in power station (fly ash). Due to shifts from current steel and electricity productions, ggbs and fly ash are becoming scarce. Calcined clays (mainly metakaolin) have attracted growing attention recently. However, not every clay is suitable for calcination, neither are large volumes of mineral waste with suitable chemical composition (e.g. construction and demolition waste, dredged material, waste soil or rock), but lacking amorphous structure. The application of shockwaves has been proved to modify the lattice structure of inorganic silicates, leading to amorphous conditions. However, this approach has never been explored to produce SCM. Shockwave generation and application can be obtained with different methods. These techniques are usually outside the civil engineering expertise, where shockwaves are investigated only in relation with explosive blasting (either for intended purposes such as excavation or demolition, or for passive protection against explosions), or earthquakes. The investigation of shockwave generation and propagation is instead carried out in aerodynamics, or matter studies in physics. One of the methods for shockwave generation mentioned in the literature refers to the application of short- and ultra-short-pulse laser. The collaboration between the applicant and the Central Laser Facility team represents therefore an extraordinary opportunity to create a fruitful, novel, and complementary partnership across two relatively far fields or research. PRICE-SCM will be the very first investigation on novel and transformative approaches aiming to produce SCM by application of shock waves on geological materials or industrial by-products, addressing the formidable challenge of unlocking the potential of large volumes of SCM diverted from landfill and made available as SCM, significantly impacting the carbon emissions of concrete and construction industry. The project objectives are: (i) to determine the effects of shock waves on the physical structure of powders such as clays or waste from industry, clarifying the optimum conditions to achieve a low-carbon and low-energy transition from crystalline to amorphous materials; (ii) to prove and quantify the reactivity performances of processed materials in the manufacture of cementitious blends by partial to total substitution of traditional binders such as Portland cement or fly ash and slag; and (iii) to determine the embodied carbon of the novel SCM and the energy use for their production, considering suitable shockwave generation and application methods
GRN: EP/Z536258/1
Period: 01/06/2025 to 31/05/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
The Global South is disproportionately vulnerable to climate change due to widespread poverty, inequality, and reliance on climate-dependent sectors, while island-based and coastal communities are among the most vulnerable due to rising sea levels, warming temperatures, and increasingly, extreme weather. Those that live on remote islands are often off-grid and resort to fossil-fuel-based provisions where possible to enable connectivity, productivity and consumption yet adding to carbon emissions that detrimentally affect their environments. This POWERE project will respond to the countervailing challenges of remote coastal communities wanting regular electricity, while lowering carbon emissions through innovating in next-generation floating photovoltaic (FPV) solar units in Indonesia—the largest archipelagic nation with 17,000+ islands. These alternative renewables will be pursued with women-led self-help groups (SHGs) among our partners’ established networks—SHGs who to date have not been engaged in renewable energy and rely upon diesel generators for electricity. The project's goals are to empower marginalised women deemed as ‘experts of everyday life’ to be at the helm of socio-technical step changes by working with FPV for remote island SHGs invested in seaweed farming. We will embed technological developments in context and in peer-to-peer networks to appraise their impact socially, economically and environmentally, including researching socio-cultural or behavioural changes and any in-group or neighbouring group benefits and tensions that may arise. Our focus then is on a holistic and synergised understanding of sustainability from social, economic, energy, environmental, and knowledge/skills-based perspectives. The main aims and objectives are to: co-develop FPV projects for off-grid island/coastal populations; conduct participatory research in 3 villages in Indonesia’s poorer outer islands with women-led seaweed farming groups for community learning and comparative analysis; co-design, deploy, and implement 4 near-shore FPV units (minimum 10 kilowatt each) and energy storage in each of the 3 villages to support seaweed farming (e.g. drying technology) and value-added activities (e.g. processing raw seaweed into finished goods for local markets); evaluate FPV’s impact on community and women’s productivity and livelihoods; establish peer-to-peer-network to channel knowledge, skills and outputs to neighbouring areas; organise regional and international conferences to incentivise stakeholders with multiple advantages of moving away from fossil-fuel reliance; develop multilingual, multi-media toolkit including text, design illustrations, infographics, photography and films with (i) capacity-building and training modules, and (ii) best practice, socially-embedded business models, and financial options for off-grid island/coastal communities foregrounding SHGs, marginalised coastal livelihoods, and human-environment challenges; disseminate outputs widely to ODA-recipient countries with off-grid island/coastal communities (e.g. Philippines, Vietnam, Timor Leste). The project is interdisciplinary, innovative and inclusive, responding to specific challenge areas of next generation solar, decarbonisation, and inclusive energy and leaving no-one behind. Project outputs include: FPV units for off-grid communities; peer-to-peer workshops and POWERE network; community-led regional conference; multimedia, multilingual toolkit including design, socially-embedded business, financial and best practice models in inclusive renewables; films—for training; to document project showcasing pilot project for public screenings; and social media clips; impact roadmap including Southeast Asian countries with remote off-grid island/coastal communities; policy briefings for local/national governmental bodies, (I)NGOs, and coastal management partnerships etc.; online symposium to engage stakeholders in Global South with similar remote, off-grid island/coastal communities and environments; 3 co-authored media articles (e.g. Conversation, Rappler, Tempo); 6 interdisciplinary open-access journal articles (e.g. Ecology and Society, Sustainable Development, Energy, Sustainability and Society, Gender and Development, HAU, Southeast Asia Research); project report; project website
GRN: UKRI641
Period: 01/09/2025 to 01/09/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
UKRI has recently invested in a Photoinduced Force Microscope (PiFM) which is used by The UK Catalysis Hub applied to local catalyst chemistry. This powerful tool – one of the few currently available worldwide – is ideally placed to provide a previously unobtainable detailed understanding of the edge chemistries of 2D nanomaterial edges. In this collaborative project, we will combine the nanomaterials expertise at UCL with the characterisation strengths of the UK Catalysis Hub to measure the IR spectra of nanosheet and nanoribbon edges with near atomic precision for the first time. These insights open bountiful opportunities across nanomaterial science from understanding and controlling nanoribbon synthesis mechanisms, to dictating edge-patterned functionalisaiton. Beyond the unparalleled insight into 2D nanomaterial chemistries, the work will further cement the UK and the UK Catalysis Hub as a world-leading centre for PiFM and advanced microscopy research
GRN: UKRI313
Period: 01/01/2025 to 01/01/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
This project will demonstrate a proof-of-concept prototype of a novel synthesis of green ammonia using water directly as a hydrogen source, and nitrogen (from air) building on previous EPSRC-funded research outcomes (EP/X016757/1). The main disruptive aspect of the technology is that it is driven by solar concentrated energy or efficient electricity-to-heat, negating the need of capital-intensive electrolysers. In addition, the new process will be inherently efficient, intermittent to align to the production of renewable energy, low-capital cost and modular, facilitating distributed manufacturing. The intended prototype will de-risk the technology to accelerate its future implementation. The use of ammonia as an energy vector will accelerate the achievement of UK Net Zero goals by resolving one of the key challenges: alignment of the production of renewable energy with our energy demands through a carbon-free, easy to liquify and store energy vector. Indeed, ammonia is a readily competitive energy carrier due to its high energy density, existing global transportation and storage infrastructure. However, as all other e-fuels (e.g. methanol, sustainable aviation fuels), their synthesis through conventional thermocatalytic processes require the use of capital-intensive and energy-inefficient electrolysers. Considering the UK’s overseas dependency on electrolyser manufacturing capacity and their high capital cost, the chances of achieving the UK Government’s target of 10 GW of electrolyser capacity by 2030 seem elusive, making the project particularly timely and opportune
GRN: UKRI650
Period: 01/07/2025 to 01/01/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
Cooling is a fundamental means to preserve peoples' good-health and well-being. Yet, it is one of the most energy demanding anthropogenic activities with global demand forecasted to increase manifold in the near future. Accordingly, we are called upon to resolve a great paradox whereby, reversing climate change necessitates strides to energy efficiency and elimination of greenhouse emissions, amid exploding demand for energy intensive processes like cooling. An emerging solution to this conundrum is passive daytime radiative cooling. The process elegantly leverages the cold Universe, converting it into an inexhaustible heatsink for the thermal radiation from objects on Earth. The cooling power current state-of-art systems achieve is enough to lower their temperature by typically 3-5°C. Compare with the fundamental limits of the technology though - 50-60°C below ambient - and it becomes obvious that today's operating point is at least an order of magnitude below the true technological potential. The bottleneck in current systems lies with the conductive and convective parasitic heat losses. Should these losses be eliminated, radiatively cooled surfaces would be freed up to equilibrate at refrigeration temperatures. To accomplish this task, advanced thermal engineering solutions will be developed, inspired by cutting-edge vacuum insulation, aerogel, nanophotonic and organic electronic encapsulation technologies. As they stand however, none of these technologies are directly compatible with radiative cooling. As such, every single component has to be radically rethought and meticulously redesigned, creating in the process a breakthrough new technology termed the Radiatively Cooled - Vacuum Insulation Panel (RC-VIP). By fully exploiting this platform technology, literally any cooling "hungry" sector can be targeted for decarbonization: the built and transport environments, data-centres, food coldchains, cooling in industrial and life-science applications, and so on
GRN: UKRI785
Period: 01/08/2025 to 11/09/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
Offshore energy systems are expected to play a vital role in the UK’s transition to net-zero. These systems – which will comprise offshore electricity and hydrogen production, multi-vector energy networks, and energy conversion systems – will need to be inherently resilient while also enhancing the resilience of the onshore systems to which they connect. However, whilst there are tools and methods for studying the reliability and resilience of individual components of the offshore energy system, there is a lack of integrated tools which can assess the resilience of the whole offshore energy system and account for crucial interdependencies. Fortunately, by adapting existing research on energy system resilience and multi-vector energy networks, our proposal can address this gap without the need for new fundamental research. The ResTOrES project will develop, test, and demonstrate a prototype resilience assessment toolkit for offshore energy systems. The toolkit will enable the quantification of resilience in terms of appropriate metrics during both standard operation and extreme events. The ResTOrES toolkit will make use of high-resolution climate model outputs to ensure that weather impacts can be appropriately represented within the extreme events for both a present day and future climate. The energy-climate data previously developed by the project team includes projections from multiple climate models including state-of-the-art data from the UK climate projections (UKCP18). A case study will be used to test and demonstrate the toolkit. This will focus on the North Sea, which will be connected to an existing multi-vector onshore network model of the North of Tyne region. The resilience of the offshore energy system, whose design will be informed by project stakeholders and proposed offshore developments, will be assessed as will the impact on the resilience of the onshore energy system. Different interventions to enhance will be tested and their impact on resilience will be quantified using new resilience metrics developed within the project. The value of taking a systems approach will also be quantified by comparing resilience from a whole system perspective with the current, siloed approach in which projects are considered in isolation. The case study systems and scenarios will give us the capability to test the prototype toolkit, refine it, and demonstrate its capabilities. At the end point of the project we aim to bring the toolkit to a level of maturity which can be passed on to a project partner for implementation as a product or service.
GRN: EP/U536787/1
Period: 01/08/2025 to 31/07/2030
Funding Source: EPSRC
Power transformers play a crucial role in electric power transmission and distribution systems, being both expensive and strategically important. Their prolonged efficient operation is essential to prevent long-term power outages. With tens of thousands of transformers worldwide approaching the end of their typical 30-40 year lifespan, the question of recycling becomes significant. Remarkably, around 95% of a power transformer's materials could potentially be recycled. Recognizing the importance of a circular economy, the European Commission adopted a Circular Economy plan in 2020, aiming to shift from a linear "take, make, dispose" model to a circular one where waste becomes a new resource. While the initial focus was on energy efficiency in transformers, the impact of materials is not negligible. The upcoming revision of the eco-design regulation for transformers in 2023 will introduce new requirements on material efficiency. The proposed project will develop research on transformer retrofilling with alternative or recycled insulating liquids. This technique is based on the replacement of the mineral oil of a transformer in service with a biodegradable and less-flammable fluid. The procedure would lead to safer and more environmentally friendly transformers and could allow the application of higher loads, deferring the replacement of equipment in service. However, the technique has not been sufficiently studied, it is needed to evaluate the impact of retrofilling on the operation of the transformer and to assess its economic and technical feasibility. Project's researchers have applied the circular economy concept to power transformers in various ways during project definition: a) Evaluating the efficient use of materials throughout a transformer's life cycle (renewable or re-refined oils instead of conventional oils) b) Lifetime extension through dielectric and thermal design review and guidance on operation and maintenance
GRN: UKRI786
Period: 01/07/2025 to 01/07/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
Context, place and cluster: The 2022 Science and Innovation Audit (SIA)1 for the Liverpool City Region (LCR) highlights Net Zero and Maritime as an emerging regional capability, with net zero being an area in which the LCR Combined Authority (CA) has stated its ambition to grow an innovation cluster. The LCR hosts one of the UK's largest maritime clusters, encompassing shipping and ports; renewable energy generation; and international freight logistics. LCR is the gateway of a nascent green shipping corridor linking the Irish sea and cross-Atlantic routes, which from political and economic perspectives, are of national strategic importance. The two principal LCR HEIs (LJMU and UoL), have been working in close collaboration with a community of industrial and policy partners, whose expertise spans the breadth of the maritime net zero sector through multiple real-world projects in the region (e.g., Bibby's world-first large electric ship2). Challenges: The LCR has the advanced innovation infrastructure (e.g., Innovation Board, SIA, Innovation Prospectus1 3) and a strong innovation asset base with market-defined comparative advantages (e.g., Port and Manchester Ship Canal). 1) What is lacking currently is an established interlinking framework necessary to underpin a fully-functional innovation ecosystem that can facilitate strong, productive and sustainable collaborations between academic, civic and business actors. 2) Also lacking is an approach to defining the best pathway for research impact to accelerate maritime decarbonisation in a currently 'hard to abate' sector which falls outside the LCRCA's Net Zero by 2040 pledge. MaLaMi aims to realise the co-creation and impact acceleration of the applied research base, and establish the foundations for future innovation-based growth that translates new developments in research and technology into commercial applications and non-academic impact, via the following three objectives: O1) To facilitate a step change strengthening the potential functioning and subsequent impact of an established research-civic-business innovation ecosystem, focused on the translation of research through TRL3-5. O2) To facilitate diverse and novel interdisciplinary public-private research collaborations, and sustainable partnerships, that allows for the translation of fundamental research into practical solutions and implementation plans relevant to the industry. O3) To provide an environment that supports and accelerates the careers of next-generation researchers and technical specialists through responsible research and innovation (RRI) training, and opportunities to lead project streams with impact potential.
GRN: UKRI341
Period: 02/07/2025 to 19/02/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
Proposal context Ambitious net-zero targets and society's expectation for a continuous 'on-demand', clean, secure, and sustainable energy commodity necessitates a significant expansion in the UK's electrical infrastructure. The DfT's 2022 report "Taking Charge: the electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure strategy" and the APC's automotive battery end-of-life value chain roadmap, published in June 2023, highlight strategic economic benefits associated with this challenge. Regional and UK-wide prosperity, allied with extending battery life provides the support needed to grow a second hand EV market to allow vehicles to be more affordable, whilst simultaneously improving environmental stewardship through improved recycling and a reduction in demand for critical raw materials, further reducing energy usage. The challenge the project addresses and how it will be applied to this: Extending battery life through tactical replacement or repair of battery cells and / or modules provides a manifold of benefits and offers new market opportunities for the transportation sector. Presently, battery designs and those sub-assembly electrical connections between cells and busbars are created using fusion or solid-state bonded processes producing non-reversible joints; i.e., separation of joints is a destructive activity if they are to be replaced, repaired or recycled. Mechanical methods have been investigated and used for early designs, but these are vulnerable to 'efficiency drop-off' triggered by 'resistance ageing', resulting from thermal and corrosive activities between the connection interfaces and loosening of connections caused by random vibrations. The University of Sheffield, Heriot-Watt University and the University of the West of Scotland will develop a sustainable manufacturing process for battery applications, enabling assembly, non-destructive disassembly and reassembly between electrical connections to achieve full recovery of the cells and busbars. Our EPSRC funding request brings together expertise from across multifarious engineering disciplines: surface engineering and flow dynamics; materials science; joining; AI; and tooling design. We will utilise outputs from previous EPSRC funding projects; e.g., 'NASCENT' to accelerate capability to produce a reversible solution.
GRN: EP/U536714/1
Period: 01/07/2025 to 30/06/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
This project aims to showcase the commercial viability of our novel algae-based carbon capture and utilisation technology (ACCU), to bridge the gap between academic research and industrial-led scale-up and implementation. Our technology utilises surplus renewable electricity to convert industrial CO2 emissions into valuable products, ranging from high-value food supplements to natural pigments or biofertilisers. Unlike conventional algae systems, our process employs an innovative two-stage approach for CO2 capture and algae cultivation, to balance out fluctuations in CO2 production and uptake (based on availability of light/electricity), as well as simplifying photobioreactor operation and facilitating CO2 transport to offsite locations. In addition to capturing carbon, our technology could be seamlessly integrated with other plant operations to fulfil secondary functions such as wastewater treatment and polishing, biogas upgrading into biomethane, or balancing out national grid fluctuations. Our technology could play a particularly important role for capturing and utilising emissions from small-to medium size emitters, which lack access to CO2 networks and are mostly excluded from national carbon capture strategies. These less energy intensive, dispersed sites account for 17.1 MtCO2e year-1, or 24% of total industrial emissions, requiring the urgent development of alternative carbon abatement solutions to meet the UKs Net Zero targets (2021 Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy). In addition, the algae product could be used to replace fossil carbon inputs to the agricultural, chemical or energy sectors, to enable a fair transition to Net Zero. Having already successfully demonstrated the operation of the technology under laboratory conditions, this proposed project seeks to test and evaluate the process under industrially relevant conditions. Working closely with our strategic project partners, representing CO2 emitters from different industries, we will identify and select potential target products which maximise value for their business, mimic site-specific conditions in our laboratories and explore opportunities for further integration with their existing processes. Findings will be summarised in the form of implementation case studies to illustrate the potential adaptation of ACCU within the context of the three industries represented by our partners. These case studies will be shared with funders, business users and policy makers to inform and educate on the potential benefits, gaps and barriers of implementing ACCU within different settings. Based on this work, we will select one of the partners for on-site trials using a bespoke prototype unit compatible with their existing operations. Leveraging digital twin technology, we will optimise system performance to maximise volumetric productivity and conversion of captured carbon into algae biomass and valuable products. At the same time, we will develop forward-looking tools that empower businesses to identify viable commercial pathways to accelerate the adoption of algae-based carbon capture and utilisation technologies. Ultimately, the project will deliver a clear and robust business case to support further industry-led implementation and scale-up via Innovate UK or equivalent funding channels
GRN: EP/Z536428/1
Period: 07/07/2025 to 06/01/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
This proposal offers a new low-cost technology for powering communications and energy applications in space namely, cadmium telluride-based photovoltaic (PV) on ultra-thin glass. Space PV is expected to experience a rapid increase in demand, the European Space Agency has forecast a PV production requirement of at least 10 GWp/year by 2035. Currently, global space PV is produced at only ~1 MW/year. An example of the rapid growth in demand is seen with constellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink, providing global communications coverage and consisting of many thousands of individual satellites each of which are powered by PV. The project will target a step-change in cadmium telluride-based PV AM0 cell efficiency with unparalleled radiation stability. This will deliver a cost-effective and supremely lightweight technology capable of meeting the scale-up challenges for powering communications and energy applications in space. The project will address fundamental challenges aimed at advancing the technology towards validation in the laboratory environment. Targeting high specific power, crucial to reduce launch cost and number of launches for emerging space applications, by increasing AM0 efficiency and reducing the cell mass. Use proton and electron irradiation studies to prove that cadmium telluride-based PV’s will lead to much longer operational lifetimes compared with existing space PV technologies. Develop passive optical coatings for anti-reflection and simultaneously control emissivity and PV temperature. Develop a comprehensive techno-economic manufacturing cost analysis, testing the prediction of a two-order of magnitude reduction in £/Wp compared to current space PV products. Identify routes to manufacturing the cadmium telluride-based PV and determine its volume/time potential to meet the demands of the growing space PV market. The outcomes of this research will feed into the vibrant renewable energy sector and are an excellent fit with the EPSRC research theme, Energy and Decarbonisation. Within this theme, there is a clear focus on thin films, flexible PV, and the utilisation of new materials. The timeliness and need of this proposal are supported by a recent multi-million-pound investment made by the UK Government to jump start its ambition to use solar energy generated in space, part of the flagship £1 billion Net Zero Innovation Portfolio
GRN: UKRI783
Period: 21/07/2025 to 21/07/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
In order to meet the UK's net-zero goals, new energy storage technologies that can store enough energy for large transport applications on land, air and sea will be required. The lithium-ion batteries that have revolutionised the EV market lack the gravimetric energy density needed for such high-energy applications. Lithium-sulfur batteries exploit redox reactions on sulfur-based positive electrodes, rather than the metal oxide found in lithium-ion batteries, offering drastic enhancements in energy density and potentially game-changing progress in electrified transportation. The most pressing challenge is to extend the cycle life to the thousands of cycles needed in transport applications. In current systems the lithium metal electrode reacts with dissolved sulfur species found in the liquid electrolyte resulting in degradation and hindering long-term cycling of the battery. Gelion has pioneered the quasi-solid-state lithium-sulfur battery, which contains a high concentration electrolyte that forces the sulfur and its intermediates into the solid-state, significantly improving the battery performance by preventing sulfur loss from the electrode. However, the reaction between the lithium metal and the cell components remains problematic for long term use and cycle life does not meet requirements for large transportation applications. The University of Nottingham and Gelion have co-developed this proposal to tackle this problem by developing hybrid electrolyte cells. This ambitious target can only be met through the synergistic collaboration of our teams. In the hybrid electrolyte cell, lithium metal is protected from reacting with the cell components by coating it with a solid electrolyte, which is in turn separated from the positive electrode by the high concentration electrolytes used in the quasi-solid-state lithium-sulfur battery. Degradation reactions between the solid and liquid electrolytes are expected, and these will be studied using fundamental chemical and electrochemical methods to understand the mechanism of these unknown reactions and determine how they impact the electrochemical properties of the cell. The impact of these degradation processes on cell performance will be determined and mitigation strategies will be employed, such as the addition of protective coatings onto the surface of the solid electrolytes to stabilize the solid-liquid interface. We aim to build a lab-scale prototype cell that can achieve hundreds of cycles with high capacity retention. The programme will yield significant new intellectual property which will be captured through close collaboration between the academic and industrial partners for exploitation and commercialization of the quasi-solid-state lithium-sulfur battery within the UK
GRN: UKRI1489
Period: 01/06/2025 to 01/06/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Geothermal technology epitomises the challenges of effective interfacing between engineering, physical and natural sciences. A geothermal facility involves inducing heat flow through two thermal resistances in series. For shallow and deep closed-loop systems, one thermal resistance is represented by the geothermal borehole and its infrastructure (casing, grout/cement, heat exchangers and transfer fluid), which can be specified and engineered with high precision. The other thermal resistance is the ground itself, whose properties are variable and controlled by nature. Heat transfer fluid does not have direct hydraulic contact with the surrounding formation, only transferring heat through conduction, thus reducing geological and reservoir risk. In predicting the performance of a geothermal system, the variability of natural properties must be characterised empirically. Modelling techniques must be employed that propagate uncertainty to outcomes (i.e., available thermal power) in a transparent and statistically defensible manner. The important thermal properties in conduction-dominated settings for subsurface heat extraction and storage are thermal conductivity, volumetric heat capacity and internal heat production. However, databases of rock thermo-physical properties for geothermal engineers are limited and often do not specify measurement conditions. Furthermore, the various multi-scale datasets require mutual calibration against each other and empirical analysis of their relationships. Government funded studies have therefore recommended systematic data acquisition and compilation. All participating nations in this proposal have large ambitions for geothermal technology and share fundamental similarities: i) continuous shared geological "terrane" from Northern Ireland, through Scotland to Norway in the form of the Caledonian orogenic belt, ii) extensive areas of "hard rock" lithology: exposure is good and representative intact rock samples of uniform size can readily be retrieved and tested, and iii) generation of large quantities of renewable electricity that can be used in geothermal heat pumps (GHP). Caledonian rocks have high geothermal potential due to their high thermal conductivities and radiogenic heat production values. The THERMOCAL vision is to carry out a systematic measurement programme - with unified sampling and analytical methodologies - of lithologies in the Caledonian terrane and underlying Precambrian basement across northern UK and Norway. Bespoke modelling of closed-loop systems will allow Investigation on the impact of data on real-world geothermal engineering applications, such as GHPs - both shallow and deep. This will result in: i) a public, representative and quality-assured database of the thermal and radiogenic properties of lithologies of the Caledonian orogenic belt, ii) improved quality assurance for the determination of these properties via interlaboratory ring testing and method harmonisation, iii) the comparison between different types of data, and iv) calibrated modelling approaches to representatively incorporate uncertainty in rock properties into engineering heat transfer models of geothermal infrastructure, ultimately contributing to the de-risking of further geothermal developments. These outcomes will benefit geothermal engineers designing future sustainable geothermal systems, and households who require efficient and reliable clean heat. The outputs will also be of importance to fields including: underground energy storage, underground structures (e.g., tunnels) and storage of thermogenic wastes, while the gamma spectrometry data may provide background for evaluation of potential national uranium and thorium reserves
GRN: UKRI568
Period: 02/06/2025 to 02/06/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
This project brings together leading researchers from the UK and Germany to develop the scientific understanding needed to create a new generation of memory-devices characterised by very low energy consumption and switching times of one trillionth of a second. This requires the development of new devices capable of operating at corresponding frequencies called terahertz (THz - 1012 Hz) i.e. thousand times faster than that used in current data communication and processing standards. Such very short pulses of electro-magnetic radiation are among the shortest stimuli available in science and technology and are made from light particles, photons, whose energies naturally match those of elementary quantum magnets, called “spins”. The THz excitation of the spins (THz spintronics) will be strong enough to induce switching of the spin orientation, representing the elementary act of writing a bit of information. As THz photons exactly match the excitation energy, this represents the optimally energy efficient switching regime, avoiding the localised heating that plagues current energy assisted data storage schemes. The key idea behind the project is to develop THz spintronics both as broadband THz emitters and as a technology capable of switching the magnetic state of a data storage element. The emitters will generate very strong pulses of THz radiation using emitters based on ultrathin layers of magnetic and non-magnetic metals. By exciting this system with an extremely short laser pulse (50 quadrillionths of a second), a transport of spins can be generated in the magnetic layer, which travels into the non-magnetic layer, resulting in the generation of an ultrashort burst of the electric current and the emission of a THz pulse. We will focus and concentrate this THz emission with an antenna onto another magnet, to switch a nanoscale magnetic bit. Our studies are expected to deliver unprecedented insights into the physics of light-magnetism interactions on extreme time and length scales while laying the fundament for the data storage technology of the future. The project is expected to cement an enduring collaboration with the bilateral partners providing a framework for new directions in the field of THz technology and ultrafast magnetism and spintronics
GRN: EP/U536878/1
Period: 01/05/2025 to 30/04/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Context Transportation accounts for 1/5th of global CO2 emissions from energy and about 20% of that could be reduced through lightweighting of metallic components. A promising strategy to achieve that is to use net-shape manufacturing processes—such as additive manufacturing (AM)—to re-design parts with optimised geometry and to employ low density materials, such as aluminium (Al) alloys. The main problem with this strategy, however, is that Al parts made by AM exhibit sub-optimal properties, which hinder their certification and use in safety-critical applications, such as in aviation. The connection enabled by this project This project will promote collaborative work between the University of Cambridge (UoC) and the National Centre for Additive Manufacturing (NCAM) as part of the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) to devise scalable AM processes for lightweight Al structures that are of interest to their industrial members, such as Airbus. The project will capitalize on the microstructure control strategies developed by the UoC research group, which will be applied to an alloy system selected by the MTC and which will be scaled up for technology validation (TRL4-6). As such, this project aims to bridge the gap between fundamental research and industrial application and—by working with Airbus—to promote the adoption of AM for sustainable aviation. The challenge addressed Laser-based AM processes typically yield builds with heterogeneous microstructure and anisotropic properties. This is due to the variable and directional thermal flux experienced by the material during AM. As a result, AM parts must undergo involved and costly heat treatments aimed at homogenising their microstructure to bring their properties within specifications. This additional hurdle hampers the adoption of AM by the industry, offsetting the potential of this technology for lightweighting and thus for reducing carbon emissions in transportation. Aims and objectives This project will directly address the above challenge. Focusing on a special Al alloy—called Aheadd® CP1 (developed by Constellium)—which has been designed specifically for laser-based AM, the research team will demonstrate the ability to make samples and miniaturized parts with controlled microstructure and mechanical properties (including yield stress, impact energy, and fracture toughness), which are within the specifications set by Airbus. The work will consist of two consecutive steps: i) inducing microstructures that can be homogenised via traditional heat treatments, thus streamlining the production of Al parts by AM, and ii) producing parts that exhibit the desired, homogeneous microstructure in their as-built condition, and thus require no additional heat treatment whatsoever. Potential applications and benefits The direct beneficiary of the work is Airbus. The company has great interest in using AM technology to optimise the geometry of Al parts used in aircraft. However, the involved and costly post-processing required to certify parts has offset the adoption of AM significantly so far. One potential application of this project outcomes is in the manufacturing of topology-optimised, high-strength landing gears in civil aircraft. The project will also benefit the team at UoC, who will be able to translate their materials processing strategies and microstructure designs from the lab to real-world applications
GRN: UKRI1237
Period: 01/06/2025 to 01/06/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
The UK Government has set out ambitious net zero target by 2050. Though battery electric vehicles (BEV) can achieve zero carbon emissions locally, there are concerns around high capital cost, limited charging infrastructure, range anxiety, weight, size, and durability of batteries. In particular, they are not suited for heavy vehicles, marine vessels and aviation, as well as non-road mobile machinery (NRMM) for agriculture, mining and construction. To achieve the ambitious net zero targets, alternative net-zero technologies need to be researched, developed, and implemented. The need for green fuels is widely accepted for such applications, with policy efforts in this direction driven by both national and international organisations, for mitigating climate change as well as building energy security. Among green fuels, hydrogen (H2) is recognised by the IEA as the most appropriate energy storage and energy carrier for long-term energy storage and transport. Therefore, many countries, including UK, Europe, US, and Japan, have been exploring the potential of hydrogen and have taken steps towards developing a hydrogen economy. The UK plans to meet an estimated 2035% of its energy needs through hydrogen. As a zero-carbon fuel, hydrogen can be used in combustion engines. Over the last few years, significant interest and effort have been invested in demonstrating the use of hydrogen in combustion engines for various applications. This Prosperity Partnership provides excellent opportunity to further collaborations between Brunel, AIE and MAHLE Powertrain on developing dedicated ultra-high efficiency and zero emission hydrogen engines. The proposed collaboration will make use of the comprehensive experimental and modelling facilities and capabilities for hydrogen combustion engine research at Brunel University London. It will build on the existing successful collaborations between the University and the two industrial partners. Through this partnership, Brunel will further strengthen its research capacity and capability on hydrogen engines, and deliver social and economic impact by transferring the knowledge into product development and commercialisation by AIE and MAHLE Powertrain. The partnership is of key strategic important to AIE and MAHLE Powertrain, and enables them keep technological advantage against their competitors for sustainable market growth. The proposed collaboration will enable AIE to develop demonstrable H2 rotary engine technology that is now being requested by potential customers and provide MAHLE Powertrain with the analytical tools for their engineering consultancy business. Additionally, the Prosperity Partnership will enable the transfer of advanced material and engineering technologies from automotive piston engines by MAHLE Powertrain to the development of advanced rotary engines by AIE. Furthermore, the prosperity partnership will help to train the next generation of engineers who will be essential for the development ofzero-carbon engine technologies by the industrial partners and beyond. Through the close collaborations between Brunel, AIE and MAHLE Powertrain, the developed hydrogen combustion engines will decarbonise vehicles, marine vessels, NRMM and aircrafts at a much lower cost basis and the energy supply infrastructure scales with the existing established supply chain, enabling a faster and more sustainable transition towards net zero
GRN: UKRI638
Period: 16/06/2025 to 16/06/2027
Funding Source: EPSRC
High speed data communication underpins many important facets of modern life. High speed internet, online learning, high-definition video streaming, cloud computing, video conferencing, online gaming, artificial intelligence and the inner works of computers themselves all rely on the ability to transfer vast quantities of data at high speed. With the continuous introduction of increasing advanced and data hungry applications, the demand for bandwidth has grown relentlessly and is set to continue into the future. As data transmission rates increase so does power consumption and in some cases can dominate the power usage of the entire computing system. The growth of power use in the ICT industry is a major global concern with predictions showing that it could account for 20% of electricity usage worldwide and emit up to 5.5% of the world's carbon emissions by 2025. To support the growth in data demands it is of paramount importance that data communication technology is able to keep pace whilst minimising power use. Communication links are continuously being converted from working in the electrical domain to the optical domain since much more data can be transmitted optically with lower power consumption. The conversion is moving to progressively shorter links as the available technology becomes more cost effective and electrical bandiwdth limits are reached. Silicon photonic technology has been a key enabler of the conversion particularly in the data centre application space since the technology allows production of integrated photonics transceiver chips in a reliable, low-cost CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) manner. Within the optical transmission link the process of converting electrical data into an optical format typically dominates power consumption. It is performed either by using an external optical modulator or by directly modulating the laser and for shorter optical links to be viable, their power usage must be reduced. For example, after almost two decades of research the performance of the silicon based optical modulator has manged to reach 100Gbaud with 1 pj/bit power consumption (including drive and tuning power), but power requirements for off chip and on chip links are ~100fJ/bit and 10fJ/bit respectively. For silicon photonic data transmission technology to meet these stringent energy and bandwidth requirements the hybrid integration of materials with stronger electro-optic effects onto silicon is essential as this will allow vast reductions in power consumption. In this proposal, we apply an advanced geometrically defined crystal growth process, tunnel epitaxy, to grow III-V semiconductors onto silicon photonic chips for use in a new-generation of optical modulation technology. The approach offers unique advantages in terms of footprint, yield, material quality and the ability to laterally grade doping levels during the growth process allowing precise optimisation of the trade-off between device bandwidth and optical loss. Combining the strength of the silicon photonics expertise at Southampton and the III-V on Si manufacturing at Cardiff, we will design and fabricate both external optical modulators and directly modulated light sources with state-of-the-art performance, targeting both short and ultra-short data reach applications. We will produce devices with 100Gbaud transmission with order of magnitude improvement in drive power which will enable the next generation of ultra short links to be viable. The developed technology will positively impact a large range of applications providing wide reaching societal and economic benefits
GRN: UKRI562
Period: 01/04/2025 to 01/04/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
Luminescent mechanoresponsive materials could display an immediate change in optical behaviour, by switching colour or emission intensity as they experience a mechanical stimulus, such as applied pressure, shear stress, tensile/compressive deformation, high-rate impact, cracking and fracture. These 'smart' materials have attracted considerable interests, because such mechano-fluoro-chromic (MFC) systems can be capitalised for a vast range of advanced technological applications. For exemplar: in non-contact optical imaging of pressure distributions over aerospace and hydrodynamic surfaces; structural health monitoring of buildings and bridges; non-invasive fatigue inspection of engineering components; tamper-proof security packaging; and mechanosensory in soft robotics. Pressure-sensitive paints (PSP) used in today's aerodynamics sector for surface pressure imaging have certain limitations, particularly luminescence quenching ('turn-off' emission), poor photostability, and temperature sensitivity. These intrinsic characteristics of current PSPs are hindering effective implementation in innovative technologies elucidated above. To address these challenges, the vision of this proposal is to design and engineer new 'turn-on' type MFC materials with an attractive combination of properties: high fluorescent quantum yield, large Stokes shift, excellent photostability, tuneable reversibility, ratiometric emission and long lifetime. That will require unconventional development of bespoke composite systems, by integrating aggregation-induced emission (AIE) and metal-organic framework (MOF) materials. Going further, to construct tuneable architectures and bespoke functions, we will engineer polymer-based composite fibres incorporating AIE-MOFs. Our pilot studies have demonstrated the efficacy of the general concepts underpinning the proposed materials engineering strategy. Efficient AIE-based PSPs with turn-on luminescence will be a game changer in the field. The high signal-to-noise ratio and improved resistance against photodegradation or other environmental factors will enable, robust pressure mapping in diverse flow environments, extending to stress visualisation in experimental solid mechanics subject to a wide range of strain rates encountered in different engineering applications. More broadly, the research outcomes stand to benefit the academia, the industry, and the general public through the generation of new materials information to realise future design and implementation of more resilient structural multiphysics, clean energy and transportation systems
GRN: EP/Z536167/1
Period: 01/06/2025 to 31/05/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
To meet the UK’s 2030 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission target we need to reduce GHG emissions by nearly 5%/year, three times the 1.5%/year reduction rate achieved since 1990. Previous reductions have come mainly from decarbonising the power sector and offshoring heavy industry, where it is becoming increasingly difficult to deliver further substantial GHG reductions. The UK is at a watershed moment where future reductions will have to be delivered differently from the past. It is simply not possible to rely on the policy of ‘electrifying everything and provide zero carbon electricity’ without also considering systems of production and consumption. This requires broader consideration of how to align patterns of production and consumption with climate targets that can deliver short term goals (by 2030) and reduce risks in the long-term (by 2050). Whilst the carbon intensity of the economy is high (79% of UK energy demand is provided by fossil fuels), there is a critical role for energy demand reduction and material efficiency measures. At the same time, the transformation of production and consumption needs to be socially just. On the production side, this will require managing the transformation of labour markets and skills provision to protect workers in affected sectors. On the consumption side, monetary and non-monetary costs and benefits associated with the transition need to be distributed fairly. A socially just transformation of production and consumption systems in line with climate targets is a complex systems problem that requires a detailed investigation into the intersecting and intertwined economic, social and political realities. Our comprehensive approach encompasses the economic, political, and social systems within which production value chains and consumption patterns evolve, and will support the development of a just, prosperous, sustainable, and resilient transition pathway to net zero. We plan to work with stakeholders to develop co-created pathways of consumption and production futures that are climate compatible. We will develop new transferable analytical frameworks for the inclusion of consumption and production measures in energy and climate policy, and we will provide much needed tools for UK industry to understand their production value chains. Our dynamic research programme will focus on actionable insights and ensure real-world impact, working with government departments, institutions, and the private sector to develop impactful test cases and demonstrate the effectiveness of systems approaches. We will develop practical business models which are fit for a net zero transition, including metrics and toolkits to measure business performance and reductions in material consumption. We will explore how changes to consumption could feasibly be implemented at each level of government, from national to local, including developing a new analytical framework for policy and political change to ensure that policies are fair, effective, and inclusive. Finally, we will evaluate the societal, political, and economic systems upon which the delivery of the UK’s transition to net zero depends. Our research programme will create a series of benefits; it will equip Government with the necessary knowledge and approaches to address unsustainable consumption patterns and carbon intensive supply chains; it will equip organisations with the evidence and knowledge to understand the carbon implications of their supply chains; and it will evaluate societal, political, and economic systems in order to cement systems approaches which can realise the UK’s transition to net zero
GRN: EP/Z536192/1
Period: 01/07/2025 to 30/06/2028
Funding Source: EPSRC
This Place Based Impact Acceleration Account (PBIAA) aims to incorporate university research strengths in offshore wind engineering into the Forth and Tay region to address challenges in the areas of design and manufacture of fixed and floating wind systems, the development of a workforce, and the delivery of large offshore energy infrastructure projects. The Lead Civic Partner Forth & Tay Offshore (FTO) is a place-based supply chain cluster, established to drive the growth and implementation of offshore renewable energy on the east coast of Scotland. It's vision for 2030 is for the region to address the timely opportunity to become home to a thriving, comprehensive, internationally competitive offshore energy supply chain serving local, national and international projects. This proposal has been co-designed with FTO via a rigorous consultation process, to identify the needs where the region can benefit most from the expertise of the university partners, and where partners outside the consortium can be involved to augment this expertise further. This PBIAA aims to establish the partnership mechanism, then accelerate and grow the impact of academic research into the cluster, particularly in the areas of offshore and geotechnical engineering, manufacturing, operations and maintenance as well as the environmental and social aspects of offshore wind. It has a number of objectives (see Table 1) and activities (see Table 2)
22/10/2025
4 new projects added
GRN: UKRI1500
Period: 01/06/2025 to 01/04/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
A major contributor to anthropogenic carbon emissions are separation processes in industry, which account for 10–15% of global energy consumption. This is mainly attributable to the tremendous amount of heat needed for the liquid-to-gas phase changes required during classical industrial operations used in the chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing industries, such as evaporation and distillation. These are used to recover and purify the organic solvents in which many chemical reactions are carried out. As the pharmaceutical industry makes the transition to net zero, there is a need for alternatives to evaporation and distillation to recycle solvents. Membranes are physical barriers that can be used to selectively permeate some molecules in a liquid, while retaining others. The great advantage of membrane separation is that there is no need to boil the liquid to separate its components – everything can be done in the liquid phase. This is why membrane reverse osmosis has become the predominant technique for seawater recovery by desalination – it uses a great deal less energy than evaporation. We have recently developed at a small-scale, a whole new range of polymer membranes with excellent selectivity between solutes present in organic solvents. These membranes are fabricated by dissolving a polymer in an (often toxic) organic solvent, and then we make them chemically stable by crosslinking them by through immersion in another (this time hot) organic solvent with a crosslinker, which joins the polymer chains and stops them degrading. Using this approach, we can make membranes that filter out solutes bigger than about 250 daltons. This is suitable for separating big and small solutes in solution but is not sufficient to filter all solutes from a solvent and enable it to be recycled. The production of membranes also creates environmental burdens, and so it is important that we make sure that any waste created in making membranes, and in end-of-life disposal, is a lot less than the waste avoided by using the membranes. The objectives of this research programme are: (i) to develop a simulation and modelling framework that enables us to evaluate the overall environmental burdens involved in making, using and disposing of a membrane to establish where the main burdens are, so we can reduce/eliminate them; (ii) we will seek to develop new, sustainable processes for membrane manufacture, completely eliminating the use of organic solvents in membrane crosslinking and replacing toxic solvents used in membrane fabrication by green, biobased alternatives; (iii) to discover membrane surface treatments that can prolong membrane lifetime and so improve overall environmental performance; (iv) we will develop ways of employing these membranes for complex molecular separations in pharmaceutical manufacturing, if necessary, using multiple membrane steps to achieve challenging goals with minimal energy inputs; (v) we will further study how these new approaches based on membranes can usher in the use of green solvents for the pharmaceutical processes. If we achieve (i)-(v), we will then turn attention to a stretch objective, new membranes based on bio-derived or recycled polymers. Our research will be guided and shaped by collaboration with our industrial partners Merck, Exactmer, and AstraZeneca who bring expertise and challenges from membrane manufacturing, green solvent utilisation, and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Ultimately our goal is to enable manufacturing of medicines with a significantly reduced environmental burden, contributing towards sustainable growth in the UK
GRN: EP/U536921/1
Period: 01/04/2025 to 31/03/2029
Funding Source: EPSRC
The world energy council has highlighted energy efficiency and renewable energies as the most prominent action priorities which would deliver the highest impact and least uncertainty to the energy trilemma (security, sustainability, accessibility). The UK Govs ambitious target to deploy low-carbon resources for 95% of the energy generation by 2030, and both on and offshore wind expected to become the backbone of electricity generation, electric generator deployment will dramatically increase together with energy and CO2 emissions associated with the increased raw material usage. In addition, electric motors consume 50% of all global energy generation and this is also bound to increase as demand from cross-sectorial electrification increases to achieve the targeted 2030 CO2 emissions reductions. The systems that these motors drive are however typically very inefficient and contribute to a significant amount of energy wasted. All applications using a rotating electrical motor or generator can benefit significantly from variable (optimal) speed operation by employing a Variable Speed Drive (VSD). VSDs utilise electronic components such as Power Semiconductor devices, arranged in a Power Converter, together with control devices such as micro controllers to generate the desired Voltage and Frequency to drive the rotating machine at the desired speed. Variable speed operation yields significant energy savings since it allows the energy delivered (speed) to be tailored and adjusted exactly to the application requirement, eliminating wastage. Despite the clear advantages however, installation costs, together with complex heavy cabling which connect the VSD to the rotating machine remain the main barriers to a much more widespread uptake of VSDs in industrial applications. The physical combination of the power converter and the electric motor into one unit, in an integrated motor drive (IMD) solution, immediately eliminates many of the barriers to adoption. Expensive and bulky cabling and connectors are removed together with environmentally controlled cabinets/rooms for the power converter. This enables higher power density, lower costs of installation and intrinsically higher reliability due to lower part count. Moreover, a further reduction in energy consumption at the manufacturing stage is achieved with a significant, overall reduction in material usage. By considering a multi-disciplinary approach, this program will focus on removing the technological barriers which make fully integrated motor drives the answer to the problem of achieving, more sustainable electricity generation, more efficient and lower weight industrial and transport applications and dramatically reduced CO2 emissions for manufacture. Our ambition is to investigate and deliver innovative technological solutions that reduce energy wastage and minimise life cycle impacts: in manufacture by reducing the quantity of material used; through life by increasing electrical system efficiency and dramatically improving power to weight and power to volume ratios; at end of life by facilitating recycling through material reduction together with increased service life. Together, our innovations will result in a step increase in energy efficiency and reductions in environmental impact- accelerating the route to Net Zero and long-term sustainability
