• Energy Research
• 2016 close

In this Proof-of-Concept project we will create a completely new kind of integrated energy solution platform based on thermoelectric (TE) heat energy harvesting materials that are capable of converting various types of heat flows directly into electricity. The strong basis for the project is the new oxide-based thermoelectric inorganic-organic hybrid materials discovered in the PI's ERC Advanced Grant Project “Molecular-Layer-Engineered Inorganic-Organic Hybrid Materials (LAYERENG-HYBMAT)”. These hybrid thin-film materials are fabricated by the combined atomic/molecular layer deposition (ALD/MLD) technique which uniquely allows for fabrication of highly conformal thin-film coatings on various flexible, sensitive, functional and/or nanostructured surfaces. Within this PoC project we will (1) design and construct a few prototype devices based on the flexible inorganic-organic thin-film thermoelectrics and (2) integrate the devices with novel material platforms (textiles, polymers, coatings). The novel integrated TE energy solutions will enable heat-based energy harvesting for usage scenarios that are not possible with the existing bulky and fragile TE materials/generators. In addition, (3) the market for flexible thermoelectric generators will be analysed and the commercialisation and the IPR strategies will be created for TE generation solutions.

The GEMex project is a complementary effort of a European consortium with a corresponding consortium from Mexico, who submitted an equivalent proposal for cooperation. The joint effort is based on three pillars: 1 – Resource assessment at two unconventional geothermal sites, for EGS development at Acoculco and for a super-hot resource near Los Humeros. This part will focus on understanding the tectonic evolution, the fracture distribution and hydrogeology of the respective region, and on predicting in-situ stresses and temperatures at depth. 2 – Reservoir characterization using techniques and approaches developed at conventional geothermal sites, including novel geophysical and geological methods to be tested and refined for their application at the two project sites: passive seismic data will be used to apply ambient noise correlation methods, and to study anisotropy by coupling surface and volume waves; newly collected electromagnetic data will be used for joint inversion with the seismic data. For the interpretation of these data, high-pressure/ high-temperature laboratory experiments will be performed to derive the parameters determined on rock samples from Mexico or equivalent materials. 3 – Concepts for Site Development: all existing and newly collected information will be applied to define drill paths, to recommend a design for well completion including suitable material selection, and to investigate optimum stimulation and operation procedures for safe and economic exploitation with control of undesired side effects. These steps will include appropriate measures and recommendations for public acceptance and outreach as well as for the monitoring and control of environmental impact. The consortium was formed from the EERA joint programme of geothermal energy in regular and long-time communication with the partners from Mexico. That way a close interaction of the two consortia is guaranteed and will continue beyond the duration of the project.

THERMOS (Thermal Energy Resource Modelling and Optimisation System) will develop the methods, data, and tools to enable public authorities and other stakeholders to undertake more sophisticated thermal energy system planning far more rapidly and cheaply than they can today. This will amplify and accelerate the development of new low carbon heating and cooling systems across Europe, and enable faster upgrade, refurbishment and expansion of existing systems. The project will realise these benefits at the strategic planning level (quantification of technical potential, identification of new opportunities) and at the project level (optimisation of management and extension of existing and new systems). These outcomes will be achieved through: a) Development of address-level heating and cooling energy supply and demand maps, initially for the four Pilot Cities, and subsequently for the four Replication partners - establishing a standard method and schema for high resolution European energy mapping, incorporating a wide range of additional spatial data needed for modelling and planning of thermal energy systems, and their interactions with electrical and transport energy systems; b) Design and implementation of fast algorithms for modelling and optimising thermal systems, incorporating real-world cost, benefit and performance data, and operating both in wide area search, and local system optimisation contexts; c) Development of a free, open-source software application integrating the spatial datasets with the search and system optimisation algorithms (trialled and tested through the public authorities representing four Pilot Cities); d) Supporting implementation of the energy system mapping methodology, and subsequently the use of the THERMOS software, with a further four Replication Cities/Regions, from three more EU Member States; e) Comprehensive dissemination of mapping outputs and free software tools, targeting public authorities and wider stakeholders across Europe.

Wind energy will play a full part in decarbonisation of the future energy mix - if the costs can be reduced. This project develops a technological concept that helps achieve that cost reduction, by utilising data in a way which directly supports quick and reliable decision making in the everyday operation of a wind farm, either on- or offshore. The volume of data available from wind turbine assets is staggering - from component temperature traces, to weather forecasts, to sea conditions. But ultimately that data needs to be used by a control room engineer to change a decision in order to be useful. This innovative project develops a decision-making system that combines advanced visualisation methods and component health systems developed by UK SMEs with decision-theory from academia, and brings this together in a way that a wind farm operator can utilise to drive down the cost of operating a wind farm.

Extreme weather conditions (i.e. strong and unsteady winds, icing, etc.) - that countries such as Iceland and the other four Nordics (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland), the UK, Ireland, Canada´s Prairies, Northern US, Russia, and Nigeria along with high altitude sites face - make traditional wind turbines (horizontal-axis) to spin out of control resulting in catastrophic system failure in the first year of operation. As a result, these locations needed a different kind of wind technology capable of working over a wide production range (whether it’s in the stormy afternoon, in hurricanes or on calm and icy winter nights in the range of -10 to -30 °C) with virtually no need of maintenance. Thus, IceWind has created a rugged, standalone, and cost-effective vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) of unique and fabulous blade design, great durability and nearly maintenance-free for off-grid applications that require a continuous (no cut-outs) source of power (electricity and heating). The excellent match of aerodynamics and materials give our NJORD turbines unique features such as optimal structural stability, strength, and hence durability to withstand the most extreme wind conditions. Our VAWT can produce electricity at very low wind speeds as well as for high speed of strong winds spinning elegantly, non-stop, and noiseless. As for our commercial strategy, we plan to respond: 1) directly to individual end-users of isolated areas for residential applications (i.e. cabins, homes, and small farms) mainly in Iceland and other EU countries (i.e. the other four Nordics, the UK, Ireland, etc.), 2) telecommunication operators for telecom towers worldwide, and 3) developing countries such as Nigeria, all demanding a reliable and sustainable source of power generation. Expected profit after deducting costs of purchase, manufacture and distribution fees amounts to a cumulative 20M€ turnover market opportunity for the 2020-2024 period.

In the face of the increasing global consumption of fossil resources, photosynthetic organisms offer an attractive alternative that could meet our rising future needs as clean, renewable, sources of energy and for the production of fine chemicals. Key to the efficient exploitation of these organisms is to optimise the conversion of Solar Energy into Biomass (SE2B). The SE2B network deals with this optimisation in an interdisciplinary approach including molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics and biotechnology. Regulation processes at the level of the photosynthetic membranes, integrating molecular processes within individual proteins up to flexible re-arrangements of the membranes, will be analysed as a dynamic network of interacting regulations. SE2B will yield information about the similarities and differences between cyanobacteria, green algae, diatoms and higher plants, the organisms most commonly employed in biotechnological approaches exploiting photosynthetic organisms, as well as in agriculture. The knowledge gained from understanding these phenomena will be directly transferred to increase the productivity of algal mass cultures for valuable products, and for the development of sophisticated analytic devices that are used to optimise this production. In future, the knowledge created can also be applicable to the design of synthetic cell factories with efficient light harvesting and energy conversion systems. The SE2B network will train young researchers to work at the forefront of innovations that shape the bio-based economy. SE2B will develop a training program based on individual and network-wide training on key research and transferable skills, and will furthermore disseminate these results by open online courses prepared by the young researchers themselves.

I. The Pile Soil Analysis (PISA) project The Pile Soil Analysis project is a joint industry initiative which is run by the Carbon Trust's Offshore Wind Accelerator program. The aim of PISA is to investigate and develop 'improved design methods for laterally loaded piles, specifically tailored to the offshore wind sector' (University of Oxford, n.d.). Currently monopiles used in offshore winds applications are designed following the guidance found in (API, 2010) and (DNV, 2014), which were written many decades ago for use in the oil and gas industry, where piles are long and slender and do not experience large lateral loads. The issue is that piles designed for offshore wind applications have much larger diameters and are significantly shorter as they need to resist larger lateral loads, resulting in an overly conservative pile being built with the soil response being altered from what was expected. The PISA project has carried out 'large scale field tests' onshore to gather data (Byrne, et al., 2015). The locations were chosen such that the soil was similar to that found in the North Sea. In order to validate the results of the field tests, computational analyses were carried out at Imperial College London (Zdravkovic, et al., 2015). The design methodology report is to be handed over to industry at the start of 2016. In order to gain a better understanding of soil response with respect to laterally loaded piles further computational modelling is required. Other areas which may be looked at include foundation response: - depending on the wider parameter space - in layered soils, made up of both clay and sand -under varied loading. The modelling will be carried out either using Imperial College Finite Element Program (ICFEP) or another commercial software e.g. AbaqusFEA. The soil will be modelled as a 'constitutive soil' similar to the method carried out by Zdravkovic, et al. (2015). II. Continuous real time heath structural monitoring The majority of the turbines that have been built have a basic data collection system in the rotor assembly called the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA). This data includes a range of different variables ranging from wind speed to oil temperature (Antoniadou, et al., 2015). The data also includes acceleration of the turbine from which it is possible to calculate the fundamental frequency of the structure. A recent study carried out in the Duddon Sand Offshore Wind Farm has found that there is a significant difference between the designed and the actual fundamental frequency for the wind turbines. The consequence of underestimating the fundamental frequency is that this allows for the possibility of increasing the operational lifetime of the structure. Another study looking at a single wind turbine in the Walney Offshore Wind Farm showed the potential increase in the operational lifetime of the structure to be 88% (Kallehave, et al., 2015) In order to further improve the optimization of wind turbines and allow monopoles to be used in locations with greater confidence the following areas will require further research: - Improve design with the use of measurements - where the design process is refined using data that is gathered. In addition to looking at the data that is gathered with the SCADA, other data collection techniques should be utilised. - More accurate modelling of the soil-structure interaction - this is related to the PISA project see above. - Improved understanding of overall structural damping in the turbine - overall structural damping is the total damping minus the aerodynamic damping. Currently there is difficulty in accurately determining the individual damping contributions to the overall damping, especially during operation (Kallehave, et al., 2015). The research falls within the EPSRC Energy theme and is sponsored by Mott MacDonald.

THE GOAL We will derive new and fundamental insight in the relation between nano-scale structure and the performance of 3rd generation solar cells, and determine how to apply this in large-scale processing. THE CHALLENGES We currently have a superficial understanding of the correlations between structure and performance of photovoltaic heterojunctions, based on studies of small-scale devices and model systems with characterization techniques that indirectly probe their internal structure. The real structures of optimized devices have never been “seen”, and in devices manufactured by large-scale processing, almost nothing is known about the formation of structures and interfaces. THE SCIENCE We will take a ground-breaking new approach by combining imaging techniques where state of the art is moving in time spans on the order of months, with ultrafast scattering experiments and modelling. The techniques include high resolution X-ray phase contrast and X-ray dark-field tomography, in situ small and wide angl