• Energy Research
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1st year is the PG Diploma and research and Industry preparation Years 2-4 are a PhD at Hull

The objectives of STOCK-CAR fit into the current requirements for environment-friendly and energy-saving processes. The project targets the development and experimental evaluation of innovative thermochemical heat storage (TCHS) materials for heating (during off periods) the cabin of a truck. The TCHS system will use the waste heat lost to the engine coolant or the exhaust gases for charging the material and water vapor for discharging. The optimization of the TCHS system needs progress not only on the material level (the available materials do not satisfy all needed requirements) but also on the functioning of the reactor model. STOCK-CAR will tackle both issues by starting from synthesis of original materials, going through a deep characterization of their physico-chemical properties and storage performances and then testing in a small-scale reactor. Functionalized and composite materials with added salts on mesoporous structures will be investigated. Mesoporous oxides (SiO2, Al2O3, ZrO2) and phosphates as well as hierarchical materials (with micro/meso/macropores) will be synthesized as supports of hydrated salts (Na3PO4, CaCl2, MgSO4, SrBr2). Surface modification of the porous oxides will induce modifications of the chemical and textural properties. Great improvements in the understanding of the key parameters for an efficient heat thermal storage are expected by controlling the oxide porosity and the chemical nature of the walls (organic functionalization). In the domain of phosphates, more stable mesoporous ALPO and SAPO will be synthesized with various chemical composition and pore size as well as hierarchical ALPO/SAPO containing both mesopores and macropores. Screening methodology will be developed for controlling the physical and thermodynamic factors governing the performance and durability of the storage systems, and to rationalize the materials design and elaboration. In order to assess the reliability of the composite, the thermal behaviour and physical structure of the synthesized materials in water vapor presence, will be studied. By determining the thermodynamic parameters and kinetics of the water/solid interaction by calorimetry, energy density vs sorption capacity, the best TCHS materials will be selected for reactor modeling and optimization of the process. Reactor at lab scale will be designed and processed for testing maximum of samples before the realization of a real heat storage system adapted at truck cabin dimensions. In parallel with the experimental approaches, the numerical developments will be also performed by involving both energy and exergy analysis of the process in order to highlight the critical components of the system, the critical phases of the cycle and to provide outlooks over optimization potential. The partners of STOCK-CAR believe that by significant advancements in new materials with tuned ability to store heat for a variable, controllable period of time and with controlled rate of charging/discharging reactions, it will be possible to develop a high efficient TCHS system. STOCK-CAR seeks not only the industrial application but also the fundamental understanding of the absorption/desorption process of developed compounds which is an important step for such application. This will make the developed methodology transferrable to many other complex/extended systems in sorption processes where solid-vapor interactions are prevailing. The goals proposed in STOCK-CAR are achievable taking into account the involved teams (LMCPA, LMI, IRCELYON and LOCIE) which comprises engineers/scientists specialized in materials, thermodynamics, heat science and process development.

There is a compelling need for well-trained future UK leaders in, the rapidly growing, Offshore Wind (OSW) Energy sector, whose skills extend across boundaries of engineering and environmental sciences. The Aura CDT proposed here unites world-leading expertise and facilities in offshore wind (OSW) engineering and the environment via academic partnerships and links to industry knowledge of key real-world challenges. The CDT will build a unique PhD cohort programme that forges interdisciplinary collaboration between key UK academic institutions, and the major global industry players and will deliver an integrated research programme, tailored to the industry need, that maximises industrial and academic impact across the OSW sector. The most significant OSW industry cluster operates along the coast of north-east England, centred on the Humber Estuary, where Aura is based. The Humber 'Energy Estuary' is located at the centre of ~90% of all UK OSW projects currently in development. Recent estimates suggest that to meet national energy targets, developers need >4,000 offshore wind turbines, worth £120 billion, within 100 km of the Humber. Location, combined with existing infrastructure, has led the OSW industry to invest in the Humber at a transformative scale. This includes: (1) £315M investment by Siemens and ABP in an OSW turbine blade manufacturing plant, and logistics hub, at Greenport Hull, creating over 1,000 direct jobs; (2) £40M in infrastructure in Grimsby, part of a £6BN ongoing investment in the Humber, supporting Orsted, Eon, Centrica, Siemens-Gamesa and MHI Vestas; (3) The £450M Able Marine Energy Park, a bespoke port facility focused on the operations and maintenance of OSW; and (4) Significant growth in local and regional supply chain companies. The Aura cluster (www.aurawindenergy.com) has the critical mass needed to deliver a multidisciplinary CDT on OSW research and innovation, and train future OSW sector leaders effectively. It is led by the University of Hull, in collaboration with the Universities of Durham, Newcastle and Sheffield. Aura has already forged major collaborations between academia and industry (e.g. Siemens-Gamesa Renewable Energy and Orsted). Core members also include the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult (OREC) and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), who respectively are the UK government bodies that directly support innovation in the OSW sector and the development of novel marine environment technology and science. The Aura CDT will develop future leaders with urgently needed skills that span Engineering (EPSRC) and Environmental (NERC) Sciences, whose research plays a key role in solving major OSW challenges. Our vision is to ensure the UK capitalises on a world-leading position in offshore wind energy. The CDT will involve 5 annual cohorts of at least 14 students, supported by EPSRC/NERC and the Universities of Hull, Durham, Newcastle and Sheffield, and by industry. In Year 1, the CDT provides students, recruited from disparate backgrounds, with a consistent foundation of learning in OSW and the Environment, after which they will be awarded a University of Hull PG Diploma in Wind Energy. The Hull PG Diploma consists of 6 x 20 credit modules. In Year 1, Trimester 1, three core modules, adapted from current Hull MSc courses and supported by academics across the partner-institutes, will cover: i) an introduction to OSW, with industry guest lectures; ii) a core skills module, in data analysis and visualization; and iii) an industry-directed group research project that utilises resources and supervisors across the Aura partner institutes and industry partners. In Year 1, Trimester 2, Aura students will specialise further in OSW via 3 modules chosen from >24 relevant Hull MSc level courses. This first year at Hull will be followed in Years 2-4 by a PhD by research at one of the partner institutions, together with a range of continued cohort development and training.

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.

It has been well reported that wind farms can impact and degrade the performance of radar systems for air traffic control, air surveillance, early warning systems and navigational. The potential interference generated by the scattering characteristics of wind turbines on radar systems is considered a significant issue and has received a lot of attention from the research community and industry alike. However, due to the geometrical complexity of the turbine structure and its enormous electrical size at radar frequencies, the study and modelling of the radar scattering presented a substantial challenge to the research community. The use of commercial Computational Electromagnetic (CEM) tools and other full-wave solvers was limited to a small number of predefined turbine orientations due to the inherent requirement of supercomputing environment or extended modelling runtimes. To accommodate for the growth in demand for renewable energy, larger wind farms are being planned for deployment further offshore -in deeper waters and less favourable seabed conditions. Floating foundations are being widely proposed to reduce costs and enable more rapid growth of offshore wind turbines. Future wind developments (Such as Hornsea Project Two and Three) included floating foundations within their Design Envelope. Some of these projects are located near a number of key shipping routes as well as offshore O&G platforms with REWS installations. To date, the effects of floating foundation on the operation and efficiency of navigational and safety radar systems operating near or within the wind farm is currently largely unknown. Large floating wind turbines will have unique scattering characteristics due to its size, construction materials, vibration profile and movements under wind loading and adverse weather/sea conditions. Floating turbines are likely to dramatically change the radar cross section and its dynamics and consequently impact radar systems. This project will study the effects of wind turbines mounted on floating foundations on offshore radar operations. The project will develop radar scattering models for the floating foundations and account for important parameters such as geometry, materials and platform movement under adverse weather conditions. This project will build on the recently awarded Supergen funding to measure and model the radar scattering from the large 7MW turbine managed by ORE Catapult. The project will analyse the measured data from the ORE Catapult turbine as well as the large dataset of wind farm/radar measurements made available to the University of Manchester by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa to further develop the existing turbine models and integrate them with the new models of the floating foundations. The analysis, verification and integration of measurements with the modelling capabilities will give a good representation of future offshore turbine. This will then be used to model the static radar returns and Doppler signature generated from the turbines under typical and adverse conditions for safety critical radar operations such as navigation under poor visibility, search and rescue efforts and REWS for collision prevention with offshore O&G assets.

The demand for sustainable, renewable sources of energy in the 21st century is one of the most important societal and scientific challenges faced by humanity. Of the various renewable energy sources available, solar energy is by far the largest and is one which is most effectively utilised in Nature via the processes of photosynthesis. Photosynthetic organisms capture solar energy using arrays of Light Harvesting (LH) proteins assembled within cell membranes. These organisms - particularly those that reside in light-challenged environments - are faced with a formidable energy problem: How to capture sufficient energy to drive their cellular metabolism? This energy conundrum is elegantly addressed by stacking two-dimensional arrays of LH proteins within multiple thylakoid membranes housed in chloroplasts. An exquisite example of self-assembly, the 3D protein ordering found in these photosynthetic organisms therefore provides the fundamental design principles to develop artificial photosynthetic materials. This research programme seeks to design and construct a new generation of DNA-programmed light-harvesting assemblies for the future applications in energy harvesting surfaces and advanced photovoltaic devices that fuse biomolecular, electrical and material components. To do so we will use DNA-Origami to direct the placement of light harvesting proteins with nano-scale precision onto engineered surfaces. This bio-inspired platform methodology merges the principles of "bottom up" DNA nanotechnology with "top down" nanolithography and would provide the means to control, for the first time, the location of each photosynthetic protein module, inter-module distance and their relative orientation in both 2D and 3D along surfaces. This new design lexicon will provide a framework to correlate how these parameters influence overall light harvesting efficiency for the production of a new class of bio-enabled solar energy harvesting surfaces and materials. The student will work within an established research team to investigate all aspects of the system, from design of the DNA-origami, to the capture of the proteins, to the subsequent construction of novel light-harvesting materials. This multidisciplinary project represents an excellent opportunity for a student with a background in either bio-engineering, physics, chemistry or biology to work at the forefront of nanotechnology research.

Few studies showed that the effects of rainfall (rain rate and drop size distribution –DSD-) on wind turbine efficiency are significant, but have surprisingly received little attention. The main goal of WR-Turb is to overcome the current lack of knowledge on this topic through a genuine collaboration between an academic institution (the Hydrology, Meteorology and Complexity laboratory of Ecole des Ponts ParisTech) and a wind power production firm (Boralex). Literature review shows that: (i) wind turbulence is a complex feature requiring appropriate framework such as Universal Multifractals (UM, a parsimonious framework that enables to quantify the variability across scales of fields extremely variable across wide range of scales) for analysis and simulations; and intermittency of the input power is further propagating to the wind turbine and power output; (ii) Rainfall also exhibits scale invariant multifractal features. WR-Turb will combine the existing knowledge on wind turbulence and rainfall fields to create a coupled framework enabling to tackle its objectives. Two distinct aspects will be studied: first the rainfall effect on the wind energy resources notably taking into account its non Gaussian extreme small spatio-temporal scale fluctuations and second the rainfall effect on the conversion process of wind power to electric power by the wind turbine. A scientific programme to be primarily implemented through two PhD projects was designed: - WP 1: Experimental set-up and data collection. An observatory for combined high resolution measurements of wind (speed, direction, shear and turbulence), rainfall (DSD, and fall velocities) and power production will be installed for 2 years on a wind farm operated by Boralex and having a 86 m meteo mast. A user friendly data base will be created and data carefully validated. - WP 2: Analysis and simulation of rainfall effects on the wind power available. It aims at analysing mainly with UM tools the collected data to quantify the influence of rainfall conditions on wind turbulence and air density. A classification of rainfall events will be designed for this purpose. Interpretation will require the development of innovative models. A new 3+1D model of drop fields in a 3D turbulent wind at wind turbine scale will be also developed. Scalar and vector spatio-temporal wind fields for scales ranging from few cm and to wind turbine size over few tens of seconds will be simulated by improving existing tools based on continuous UM cascades - WP 3: Analysis and simulation of rainfall effects on energy conversion by wind turbine. The transfer of wind intermittency to power production will be analysed from the collected data (WP1). Then, two numerical modelling chains with increasing complexity will be developed to simulate and quantify the effect of wind turbulence on power production. The wind fields simulated in WP2 will be used (i) to compute available torque fluctuations, and (2) as input in a multi-disciplinary model for numerical simulation of wind turbine behaviour (existing to be customized). Ensembles of possible inputs will be used to quantify the sensitivity of the modelling chains to various input parameters corresponding to the different rainfall conditions. The share of renewable energy is rapidly growing in France and Europe. Hence it is highly relevant to understand the uncertainty affecting the electricity production by such resources, notably because its intermittent nature raises complex challenges in terms of grid management. WR-Turb will have a strong impact on this field by providing a quantification of rainfall effects of wind power production and opening perspectives for improving nowcasts. Results will be up-scalable to other site because they will mainly be event-based. The novel findings of WR-Turb, which will be disseminated to both the scientific and professional community, will also open the path for future investigations.

Worldwide installations of photovoltaic solar cells are rapidly reaching the terawatt level. Crystalline silicon is used for more than 90% of these, and this market share is growing. The best single-junction silicon cells have efficiencies of up to 26.7%, and record cells are closing in on silicon's maximum efficiency of 29.4%. This limit can be exceeded by placing a wider bandgap semiconductor on top of the silicon base cell to form a tandem configuration. This could enable solar cells to have efficiencies of 35% or higher. The key to the success of such an approach is to ensure the incremental cost of the top cell is realistic in the context of the relatively low cost of the silicon base cell. Recent advances in wider bandgap low-cost manufacturable top cells (such as perovskites) make such tandem architectures extremely timely. If these are successful they will have a significant impact on global energy production by renewable sources. The interface between the silicon and the wider bandgap material is the key topic to address at present. This PhD project will address the fundamental materials science of the interface between the silicon and the top cell to accelerate the development of tandem cells. Ultra-thin passivation films (< 1 nm) will be produced using atomic layer deposition (ALD), and these exhibit excellent thermal and electrical stability when applied to semiconductor surfaces. The objective will be to develop a fundamental understanding of the passivation mechanism at the atomic scale and how processes can be manipulated in order to achieve optimal long-term thermal and electrical properties. The films developed may then be applied to a selection of silicon-based tandem photovoltaic architectures.

Energy conversion is a sector whose development is strategic for our future. The objective of this collaborative project is to develop multifunctional nanocomposites coatings solutions with high performance for concentrated solar thermal conversion into electricity (CSP). CSP technologies are currently in full development (up to 25% of the global electricity production forecast for 2050). Nevertheless, the solar fields of the CSP plants require an increase in their conversion efficiency and a lowering of costs because they represent, whatever the technologies, about 30% of the installation costs and 50% of the yield losses (mirrors, protections, absorbers). NANOPLAST project is focused on the development of high performance coatings for solar absorbers. One of the important points is the sustainability of the systems in function (# 25 years required). Aging studies of coated systems in order to predict their lifetime are therefore imperative, whereas they are almost non-existent at present. In the NANOPLAST project, low environmental impact and commercially transferable plasma processes will be developed. Their versatility will make possible to achieve a wide range of composition and structuring 2D (multi-nanolayer) and 3D (inclusions at the nanoscale) of thin layers. The thermo-optical performance of nanocomposite structures (SiC / metal, TaON) will be evaluated by the consortium (4 laboratories and 1 industrial) recognized in the fields of CSP applications envisaged. The aim of this project is to meet the growing demand for nanocomposites on a European scale through an integrated understanding of the complete chain, from synthesis to performance evaluation. Given the needs for the CSP, the objectives of the NanoPLaST project are: - the development of multilayered multi-functional nanocomposite materials - developed by high-density versatile plasma technologies with high transfer potential to industry - with a high efficiency of solar thermal conversion via spectral selectivity - with high durability: resistance to high temperature into air (500