HARWELL, UK (1 June 2022) The Faraday Institution today awarded 16 small, fast-paced, focused projects in areas not covered within its existing battery research portfolio. In doing so it has widened its research scope, and set of university partners, in an initiative that will inform future priorities for its research programme beyond March 2023.
The new seed projects, in the areas of anodes, electrolytes, cathodes, next generation technologies, applications and data management, and flow batteries, aim to deliver transformative results that may lead to a second stage of collaborative research beyond the initial exploratory work.
“These novel projects are in areas of application-inspired research that continue to strengthen the UK’s position in electrochemical energy storage and ultimately contribute to making UK industry more competitive,” said Professor Pam Thomas, CEO, Faraday Institution.
“With the initiation of these projects, we are delighted to welcome four new universities, Durham, York, Loughborough and Queen Mary University London, to the Faraday Institution community, bringing the total to 27.”
In total 14 universities are involved with the seed projects: Durham, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Nottingham, Imperial, Leicester, Loughborough, Oxford, QMUL, Sheffield, Strathclyde, Surrey, UCL, and York. The projects will run for a maximum of 12 months and represent a £2 million investment in research by the Faraday Institution. The funding round was highly competitive; it was oversubscribed by four times.
The two projects on flow batteries (a potentially transformative, low-cost energy storage technology for emerging economies), totalling £277,000, are being funded with UK aid from the UK government, via the Transforming Energy Access (TEA) programme. TEA is a research and innovation platform supporting the technologies, business models and skills needed to enable an inclusive clean energy transition.
Descriptions of the projects can be accessed on the Faraday Institution website . The projects, principal investigators and universities involved are:
Anodes
Electrolytes
Cathodes
Next-generation technologies
Applications and data management
Redox flow batteries
Launched just four years ago, the Faraday Institution has convened a research community of 500 researchers across 27 universities and more than 50 industry partners to work on game-changing energy storage technologies that will transform the UK energy landscape from transportation to grid.
The core Faraday Institution research programme encompasses 10 large, coordinated, multi-disciplinary research programmes on battery degradation, modelling, recycling, cathode materials, electrode manufacturing, solid-state, lithium-sulfur and sodium ion batteries, as well as a range of smaller projects: industry sprints, and industry and entrepreneurial fellowships.
For more information on the Faraday Institution, visit www.faraday.ac.uk and follow @FaradayInst on twitter or LinkedIn .