• Energy Research
• OA Publications Mandate: No close
• 2017 close

The photovoltaics field has been revolutionized by the emergence of lead-based hybrid perovskites. These materials are high quality semiconductors that can be deposited cheaply, from solution, at room temperature. However, the toxicity of lead and stability issues for these perovskites are driving a new search for more benign and stable alternatives. In this project we will try to find other chemically processable Bi based compounds which resemble the same defect tolerance as Lead based perovskites, but tackling the two major drawbacks mentioned earlier. The project will study the effect of systematic doping of BiOI with chalcogenides S and Se on the optical and electronic properties of the films. The aim is to form idealized microstructures in large area, chemically grown thin films and in doing so optimize the physical properties and optimize transport properties to give long diffusion lengths. Different experiments will be conducted and will give insight into routes to improve the transport properties and minority-carrier lifetimes in BiOI and related films, and to maximize charge extraction at device interfaces, all of which should provide a route to more efficient photovoltaic devices.

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.

China, as the largest energy consumer, relies heavily on power generation from fossil fuels such as coal, leading to serious air pollution issues. It is therefore crucial for China to transit towards cleaner energy supply. Solar energy resources are abundant in China, particularly in the poorest western provinces, and renewable power generation can potentially play a vital role in energy supply for China in the future. On the other hand, although China became the second biggest economy in the world, it still remains a developing country and its per capita income is ranked as NO. 84 in the world. The exploitation of the abundant renewable energy resources in the underdeveloped regions in China can also help to boost local economy and tackle poverty. This project aims to develop a heat storage enhanced ORC power technology to utilise renewable heat sources (e.g. solar energy) for localised power and heat supply. ORC power generation technology is believed to be the most promising technology for power generation from low temperature heat sources. Unlike solar PV panels converting sun light into electricity, ORC power plants convert solar thermal energy to power. Integrated with heat storage, solar thermal ORC systems can overcome the intermittency of sun light and provide more stable power generation and heat supply. By increasing the running time of the ORC system, the payback also increases making this technology more affordable as compared to conventional, fossil based sources of energy. Furthermore, their reliability is also increased as the heat input and output are buffered and regulated. Apart from its application to solar energy, such technology is also attractive for utilising geothermal energy or waste heat sources. The wide installation of the developed system will make contribution to the decarbonisation of the economy China, and ultimately reduce the air pollution improve the urban populations' life quality. The proposed research and development will address several challenges that hinders the commercialisation of these technologies. On the Chinese side, Beijing University of Technology (BJUT) will develop high efficiency single screw expander technology for this project, and contribute to the development of high temperature heat storage technology using molten salts. The business partner, China Investment Yixing Red Sun Solar Energy Technology Company(CIYR), will manufacture the expanders and develop the solar powered technology demonstrator. On the UK side, Sunamp will develop and provide medium to high temperature heat storage technology using phase changer materials. The University of Glasgow (UOG) team, building upon their two on-going EPSRC projects on small scale ORC technologies, will focus on the design of the integrated system, the control strategy, and power electronic systems for the connection with grid. The four project partners, having expertise of different subsystems of this integrated technology, form a uniquely strong consortium to address these challenges and to bring the TRL of the proposed technology towards the commercialisation stage.

With the emerging automated tasks in vehicle domain, the development of in-vehicle communications is increasingly important and subjected to new applications. Although both wired and wireless communications have been largely used for supporting diverse applications, most of in-vehicle applications with mission-critical nature, such as brake and engine controls, still prefer dedicated wired networks for reliable and secure transmission. One of the key challenges for data wiring is to facilitate the interconnectivity of increasing devices, e.g., sensors and electronic control units (ECU), effectively creating an in-vehicle network with low response latency, improved reliability and less complexity. The space requirement, weight, and installation costs for these wires can become significant, especially in future vehicles, which are highly sophisticated electronic systems. Given that vehicle components, sensors and ECUs are already connected to power wires, we apply vehicle power lines, which have recently been utilized for in-vehicle communications at the physical layer, to in-vehicle networks in this proposal. Taking mass air flow sensor as an example, it has one power wire and two signal wires, it will be efficient to use power line communications to replace the current signal wires, so 66% of wiring can be reduced. The advancement of vehicular power line communications (VPLC) can provide a very low complexity and free platform for in-vehicle networks, which is ideal for the increasing demand of applications in particular with future vehicles. However, the emerging VPLC is constrained by lack of protocol support, which pose significant challenges to deploy it in practise and ensure mission-critical communications. The following example illustrates the motivation of this proposal. An example for the motivation: A future vehicle is equipped with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) which can be connected with multiple sensors and ECUs to provide safety monitoring and control. An important demand of this scenario is that the systems, viewed as sources, should have stable connections with all ECUs, or network destinations. And it is also important that such in-vehicle networks must guarantee ultra-low latency for emerging control services since any seconds of delay may cause fatal accident. Therefore, an effective protocol design is crucial for VPLC to support future applications with mission-critical and high-bandwidth demands. The aim of the project is to improve the reliability of the network and guarantee stringent mission-critical requirements of in-vehicle applications in vehicular power line communications. We will partner with automotive specialists and construct the project to develop innovative and intelligent in-vehicle communication protocols. The solution this proposal is seeking is two fold. One is to pursue new design of intelligent access and congestion control solutions by fully exploring the practical and theoretical analysis, dynamic nature of channels/traffic patterns and self-learning techniques, which provides the theoretic aspect of the proposal. Then, the second step is from the practical aspect, where the proposed power line method shall be able to coexist and cooperate with existing state-of-the-art solutions, and its performance will be validated by practical in-vehicle traffic data. Obviously the two are inseparable not just because the ultimate goal of reliable communication for in-vehicle networks is only possible with the accomplishment of the both two parts, but also because the interaction between the two parts is the key for effective system design.

Solar energy conversion and storage by Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technologies receive an increasing attention because the integrated thermal energy storage (TES) system enhances the reliability, the dispatchability (production of electricity on demand) and reduces the operational cost of CSP plants (increase of annual capacity factor). Currently available options of TES system for CSP applications mainly include two-tank storage and single tank thermocline. Two-tank storage is the most common design and widely used in which hot and cold fluids are located into two separate tanks. In single-tank thermocline storage, both hot and cold fluids are stored within the same tank, but separated by a temperature gradient (stratification) during different operating periods. It is a more cost competitive (about 35% cheaper compared to two-tank storage) and efficient option: space compactness, reduced thermal loss, use of cheap solid materials as fillers and no extra heat exchanger needed between hot and cold tanks. However, no industrial-scale prototype was built and tested in the world since about 30 years. The main scientific barriers include: (1) lack of detailed data obtained by independent research organization; (2) reduced controllability of the temperature stratification which may be strongly disturbed by maldistribution of the injected inlet fluid flow; (3) non-optimized packing configurations of solid fillers. How to overcome the flow maldistribution problem is actually one major challenge. In fact, the improper design of fluid distributor/collector may cause the flow non-uniformity, local turbulence and recirculation. The mixing of hot and cold fluids and the disturbance of the temperature stratification (increase of the thermocline thickness) will reduce the energy efficiency of the system and the storage capacity. The general objective of this project is to design and develop a single tank thermocline technology with high energy efficiency and storage capacity by thermal stratification and optimized packing configurations, as a TES system for CSP plants. In fact, this innovative technology is not limited to CSP applications but can be applied in the TES sector in general. The major novelties of the proposal include: (1) systematic studies from the design tools, the modeling, local experiments to the prototypes testing and scaling up guidelines. All these steps were never performed before with the purpose of developing a validated model that can be applied to thermocline tank scaling-up; (2) optimized baffled fluid distributor/collectors to solve the flow maldistribution problem, which was rarely tackled before. The energy efficiency improvement and the storage capacity enhancement by maintaining the undisturbed temperature stratification in the thermocline will be highlighted; (3) use of recycling materials as fillers to reduce the material cost (by a factor of 5 to 10), an idea developed in the framework of a previous ANR project SOLSTOCK, but has never been demonstrated at pilot scale (>100 kWth). The proposal is thus ambitious. It presents a research of multi-scale nature from the fundamentals (3D modeling, fluid management) via a lab-scale experiments for hydrodynamic study and fluid/solid interactions, to the field testing of pilot-scale prototypes with different heat transfer fluids and global performance evaluation/optimization of the TES system. Finally it includes steps towards the system integration optimization, the scaling-up issue and the commercialization of the thermocline technology for CSP plants. The project will be realized in collaboration between two academic partners (LTEN-CNRS and PROMES-CNRS) and two industrial partners (Eco-Tech Ceram and ADF PROCESS INDUSTRIES). The consortium presents excellent and complementary experience and expertise. The strategies and methods for operating the project are well established to ensure its good progression.

This overseas travel grant application seeks to fund some travel for a five and a half month research trip to the University of Toronto. Energy Systems and Engineering are vital to our daily living, but the generation of power for heating, electricity and vehicles propulsion has environmental impacts. This project links research into Energy and Environmental Analysis, particularly related to bioenergy and resource management, in the UK and Canada. The research will build on the applicant's current research in LCA, bioenergy and energy planning. Emerging energy technologies and resources provide new challenges: can they provide our energy needs, and where will the resultant impact be? As we see with fossil fuels, the impact can be delayed in time (temporal variation) and can vary widely in spatial terms (extraction emissions occur in one place, and localised pollutants occur in another). LCA has become a tool widely used by policy makers in the energy industry, but it is still a somewhat blunt instrument for the job. Generally LCA impacts are amalgamated over time and therefore treated and reported as a single impact at one point in the life cycle of the product or system; the distribution of resource use and emissions over time is lost. Some researchers have begun to look at more dynamic modelling, for example, combining instantaneous and cumulative radiative forcing of GHG over time but none have linked this dynamic modelling across a wide range of inputs and outputs. None have looked at how these impacts, looked at in the wider system of commodity production and emissions can help us plan when impacts occur in order to minimise impact. The aim of the project is threefold: 1. To gather data to produce: a. Energy and carbon balances and life cycle assessments of shale gas as it could be used in the UK. b. Potential Impact of localised emissions associated with bioenergy (and in the longer term, vehicles) c. Guidance on global policy and GHG accounting methods for resource management 2. To build novel research approaches in energy and resource planning, to develop: a. A dynamic life cycle emissions model (to be developed into a further grant application) b. An Energy Planning Framework (again to be developed into a further grant application) 3. Exchange knowledge with, and learn from colleagues at with the aim to build lasting research and teaching relationships with opportunities for further exchange at the PhD and post graduate level: a. The Institute for Sustainable Energy, University of Toronto, and especially the main contact, Prof Heather McLean b. The Athena Sustainable Materials Institute c. The Canadian Energy Research Institute

The Solar Steam project will demonstrate a solution for the use of solar heat in industrial processes that overcomes the current barriers associated with this energy source. The approach is based on the development of an innovative solar thermal collector by Larkfleet Ltd using novel optimised Fresnel lenses to create low-medium temperature thermal energy for use in the manufacturing sector. Using Cranfield University expertise in precision engineering and concentrated solar thermal energy, this system will be modular and compact to be easily installed and operated for easy installation and operation. This technology will drastically reduce the need for natural gas and coal generators, and provide a more affordable and sustainable source of low-medium heat.