• Energy Research
• OA Publications Mandate: No close
• 2021 close

Africa is facing the challenge of generating more power to meet existing and future demand. Currently, about one-half Africa's total population is lacking access to electricity. However, the continent is well endowed with renewable energy resources; it is estimated that about 35% of the world resources for wind energy are located in the continent. There are many challenges which hinder the development of infrastructure for wind energy in Africa. Designing suitable foundations to sustain the loads typically applied by wind turbines represents a particular challenge. Most potential locations for wind turbines in Africa are in tropical zones where fluctuation in ground water level is severe. The cycling of water levels means that many deposits of interest are unsaturated for at least part of the year. Unsaturated soils exhibit complex mechanical behaviour, coupled to changes in water content. This research aims to provide design for the foundations of wind turbines in unsaturated soils.

The Bloca Project is the development of a new construction method for housing. It has been developed as response to the exposed fragility of global supply chains from Covid-19\. The concept is based around decarbonising and circular economy principles, with the maximum possible sustainable content, and a design approach which allows the entire component to be reused at the end of its first application Scottish Gaelic for "block", Bloca enables rapid building construction, is materially efficient yet structurally stable, highly energy-efficient, sustainably and locally sourced, and adds economic value to local resources. It is a flexible system that can be reused time and again, allowing buildings to be constructed, extended, modified, rebuilt and easily recycled. The standard nature of Bloca means that it literally fills the gap between custom full SIP (Structural Insulated Panel) construction (bespoke manufacture - expensive, large and heavy) and full build at site (time & expertise consuming). The assembled team represents a blend of innovation, experience, materials expertise, customer input and research capability: **4c Engineering**, the lead partner, are an innovation & engineering consultancy with a track record of leading technology development from complex wave power devices, through to aquaculture innovation and novel PPE. 4c Engineering will apply an engineering innovation & manufacturing mindset to conventional construction. **Macbeath Architects/Thermopassive**, another innovative company, are a Highland based architecture firm with nearly 40 years experience, and they are experts in the design of SIP-based domestic constructions.. **Norbord**, the local producer of OSB (oriented strand board), will provide technical advice on the material properties, and provide sample material. The **University of the Highlands and Islands** (UHI) are contributing expertise from their Construction & the Built Environment Team. Providing customer input, **Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE)** represent the public sector. They have a strong interest in developing innovative, sustainable construction for their showpiece Inverness Campus site. Additional customer input will come from **Pat Munro Ltd**, an established private-sector house builder with a track record in innovation. They own the Carbon Dynamic modular housing business and build affordable housing for a local housing association. **Capella IP** will support the project by providing a practical, comprehensive approach to Intellectual Property. The primary theme for this project is localisation of supply chain as response to Covid-19 crisis, however it also strongly reflects these themes: * decarbonising and circular economy - (project has sustainability at its core) * geographic or regionally targeted innovation (this is particularly suited to timber-rich, remote and rural areas) * innovation that is aimed at commercial or residential users (the product can be used for self-build or commercial) * climate change adaptation and environmental sustainability (the net effect of the above points).

The UK is No. 1 in the world for installed offshore wind power and continues the deployment in a predominant speed in the next few decades to meet 2050 carbon emissions targets. The increasing sizes of offshore wind turbines pose significant challenges in the operation and maintenance of all its components. In particular, wind turbine pitch bearing, as the safety-critical interface between the turbine blade and the hub to rotate the blade for power generation optimisation and emergency stop, is typified as the large, slow, partially rotated bearing but it is the weak part and bottleneck for large offshore turbines (Emerging grand challenge). In addition, the UK will have a large number of onshore turbines approaching the end of their design life by 2030. The pitch bearing poses a significant risk for the decision making in ageing turbine decommissioning or life extension (Upcoming challenge). In-situ pitch bearings condition assessment is a major and open challenge for the whole wind industry as there are no industrial standards available yet and few existing in-situ methods, such as endoscopy and grease analysis, can only partially assess the pitch bearing conditions. Therefore, it is essential to develop effective in-situ condition assessment methods and tools in order to reduce high maintenance cost, unplanned downtime and risk of catastrophic failure, improve reliability and energy efficiency of onshore and offshore wind power generation and enable reliable decision making in ageing onshore wind turbine life extension. The ambitious research is, for the first time and at the international forefront, to develop intelligent pitch bearing condition assessment methods and in-situ tools using vibration and acoustic emission measurements. In particular, the research tackles the global grand challenges in wind industry by addressing the fundamentally technical challenges related to weak, noisy, and non-stationary data analysis for large slow speed bearings. This will be achieved by developing novel algorithms with sparse signal separation, data fusion and machine learning methods, followed by significant demonstration activities on both lab and real world operating environments. The PI has developed the first industrial-scale wind turbine pitch bearing platform including three naturally damaged bearings with over 15 years operating life in a real wind farm and advanced data collection instrument. The newly built platform lays a solid foundation for the proposed research and creates an ideal platform for carrying out demonstration and impact activities. The PI has also secured the unique opportunity to carry out field data collection and demonstration in real world operating wind farms under the strongest supports provided by two industrial project partners. The data collected from three naturally damaged bearings will be made publicly available under open-source licences to enable other researchers to carry out condition assessment for large slow speed bearings. The IP developed during the project will be protected. The developed algorithms will be made publicly available, if not conflicted with the IP. The successful outcome of this project will break new ground in in-situ pitch bearing condition assessment methods and tools, contribute to industrial standards of pitch bearings, and benefit a wide range of industries that use large slow speed bearings, such as offshore oil, gas, mining and steel making, over many decades of bearing service life. The novel methods with regard to weak, noisy and non-stationary data analysis can be used for wide data-driven applications. Therefore, the project has a significant, wide and long term impact in the next few decades.

Photosynthesis captures the power of sunlight to drive the growth of plants on land and single-celled bacteria and plankton in the oceans, underpinning all global food chains and providing the oxygen we breathe. Because our planet Earth is mostly covered in water, the quantity and activity of water based photosynthetic bacteria is stupendous; billions of tonnes of photosynthetic bacteria grow in the oceans every year. These bacteria have to compete with each other for sunlight, and have evolved to live at different depths and environments, even growing in extreme conditions 100 metres or more below the surface. Sunlight is made up of a spectrum of many different colours of light and different bacteria have evolved specialised chemicals called pigments that absorb a particular colour of the spectrum. Future biotechnological applications of photosynthesis are likely to require multicoloured bacteria containing multiple pigments that can harvest more of the solar spectrum than evolution has demanded of them. That way they could use more solar energy for making chemicals useful for man. Achieving this would mean putting together 'mix and match' combinations of pigments from different bacteria inside one cell. This is now possible because we have been finding out how photosynthetic bacteria make each type of pigment - chlorophylls, bacteriochlorophylls, bilins and carotenoids. They do it by using sets of biological machines called enzymes that work together in a production line called a biosynthetic pathway. We have found that we can create new pigment biosynthesis pathways by combining the genetic codes for enzymes from more than one type of photosynthetic bacterium. This teaches us more about how the natural enzymes and pathways work and being able to build or make something is the ultimate test of whether you understand it. The first part of this research programme will create new pathways and combinations of pigments in a photosynthetic bacterium. The second part will find out how these new pigment combinations work together to absorb new colours of light from the solar spectrum both inside the cell, and on biomimetic silicon chips. The third part starts the process of converting a bacterial cell such as E. coli, which is colourless and lives by respiring oxygen the way humans do, into a photosynthetic cell. The simple way to do this is by importing a primitive light-powered protein called proteorhodopsin from oceanic bacteria, but we will also begin the more ambitious large-scale genetic engineering of E. coli and similar bacteria so they can make bacteriochlorophyll, bilin and carotenoid pigments. Such cells will have internal solar panels that allow them to use sunlight for the first time. These light-powered cell factories have great potential for future biotechnology and bioenergy applications such as the production of, for example, alcohols, alkanes and novel pharmaceuticals. In the last part of this research programme we will take something that is already useful, in this case photosynthetic cells that make biodiesel, and use our pigment biosynthesis engineering to make them more efficient at using light to drive biodiesel production. We will go prospecting for new pigment biosynthesis genes, since we have only scratched the surface in terms of the number of pigment pathway genes out there in the oceans. New genes can be found using a machine that sees the colour of cells and plucks valuable single bacteria out of seawater so their DNA can be sequenced to look for new pigment pathways. We hope to use the genes we discover, as well as the genes we already know about, to build new bacteria that can capture and use solar energy. This knowledge is important to us all, not just because capturing and using solar energy fuels life, but it also holds the secret of using cells that one day could give us clean, unlimited energy and valuable chemicals from sunlight.

The collaborative InSET4KTI project among two UK industries EnSO and CoolSky, one Kenyan industry, Eenovators, and one UK university, Brunel University London (BUL), aims to deliver a radically innovative compact solar thermal technology to harness Kenya’s vast solar resource to supply heating energy required in the Kenyan tea sector. Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) managed 67 tea factories are facing serious challenges to replace currently used wood fuel due to regulatory, economic and environmental requirements. The InSET4KTI solar technology is proposed as a cost effective and technologically viable solution. InSET4KTI project will design, manufacture and install a prototype solar field at KTDA’s Kagwe Tea Factory (KTF). A successful demonstration at KTF will enable rolling out solar thermal technology to all 67 KTDA factories providing a direct route to pass cost savings to 560,000 smallholder farmers who receive a bonus payment based upon the profitability of the tea catchment they supply – any reduction in the energy cost of tea production will therefore result in increased incomes to farmers. This grant will unleash an opportunity for solar heat technology in African and global tea industry, growing UK’s solar energy business.

Renewable energy sources offer exciting opportunities to address challenges caused by energy security and climate change. Photovoltaic (PV) cells in particular can enable sustainable generation of electricity on a large scale: the solar energy incident on the surface of the earth in one hour is enough to provide the whole world's current yearly energy requirements. As an exciting newcomer to the PV landscape, organic-inorganic metal halide perovskites now show certified power conversion efficiencies for single-junctions thin film solar cells in excess of 22%. The best performing single-junction cells are currently all based on lead iodide perovskites with A-PbI3 formula, where the cation A is typically methylammonium (MA), formamidinium (FA), Caesium (Cs) or a mixture thereof. Many analysts in the renewable energy sector believe that the most effective commercialisation of these novel perovskites is in combination with existing, well-established silicon technology. Here, a perovskite thin-film cell is combined with a silicon cell in a 2- or 4-terminal tandem cell, boosting efficiency at small additional cost. For optimised tandem architectures, the photocurrents created by each cell need to be balanced, which requires a perovskite with band gap near 1.75eV, significantly above the typical bandgap of ~1.5eV displayed by the established A-PbI3 materials. To date, the only high-performance perovskite thin-film materials ideally matched for tandem applications with silicon are based on the A-Pb(Br_x I_(1-x))3 system, which allows band gap tunability from ~1.5 to ~2.2eV when the bromide content is varied between x=0 (iodide only) and x=1 (bromide only). However, the mixed halide perovskites are affected by an instability whose origin mystifies researchers. When illuminated with visible light, the material segregates spontaneously into iodide-rich and bromide-rich domains. This effect is transient, and recovers in the dark over the timescale of minutes. For photovoltaic applications, the potential voltage shifts and charge trapping associated with this effect are highly detrimental to the aim of stable PV operation. Recent research at Oxford and in the international research community has shown that materials can sometimes be stabilized through choice of A-cation and enhanced crystallinity. However, photo-stability was found to depend sensitively on processing conditions, with instability recurring when protocols or environmental conditions were varied. These incipient studies suggest that the photo-induced halide segregation is not as such intrinsic and therefore can be remedied, but a global picture of how this can be done remains elusive. Our programme will identify the causes underlying this effect and pioneer new materials that are photo-stable over projected solar cell life spans. We will achieve these aims through a novel programme that brings together a team of world-leading investigators with complementary skills in photovoltaic materials and devices, advanced spectroscopy and high-resolution electron microscopy, and in-situ crystal structure analysis. The outcomes of this programme will enable the development of long-term photo-stable, fully optimized materials for use in tandem cells with established silicon photovoltaic technology.

In many areas around the world dominant load on offshore wind turbines is from environmental forces. One example of this is in China where typhoons can do considerable damage to offshore installations. This project builds up from fundamental modelling of the underlying environment and how offshore wind turbines interact with this, to analyzing the structural response and design scenarios. The project will have four themes: The first stage examines the wave environment in areas of moderate depth and complex bathymetry with wind input. The second and third stages of the project will analyse loads from wind and waves on offshore wind structures. The fourth stage will examine the associated structural and geotechnical design. An ongoing theme throughout the project will be directed towards outreach, networking and dissemination. The project will improve our understanding of the underlying physical processes as well as exploring the design and environmental implications. In particular, the first theme will provide a better fundamental understanding of typhoon-wave interactions, an important topic in its own right in ocean environmental science. The project will use a wide-range of techniques to tackle the particular problems. These range from analytical modelling of the underlying equations, numerical modelling, physical modelling, and analysis of field data. Insight from all these approaches will be pooled to tackle the challenge of designing offshore wind turbines in harsh maritime environments.