• Energy Research
• 2021-2025close
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1st year is the PG Diploma and research and Industry preparation Years 2-4 are a PhD at Hull

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.

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.

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.

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.

The aim of this project is to specifically look at the development of advance structural damping simulations based on subcomponent qualification with different material basis (carbon vs glass, balsa wood vs foam cores). The PhD would work on a structural model simulating the energy dissipation associated to the damping of structural vibrations. This modelling should be performed in the model domain such that Rayleigh damping values can be estimated for wind turbine load simulations.

Triboelectric generators rely on contact-generated surface charge transfer between materials with different electron affinities to convert mechanical energy into useful electricity. This project aims at developing biocompatible triboelectric materials for flexible and conformable energy harvesting devices that could power biomedical implants, thus reducing the need for batteries. Novel polymer-based materials will be investigated, and additive manufacturing techniques will be used to design energy harvesting devices for target biomedical applications. The triboelectric energy harvesters developed will be tested using bespoke experimental setups and in conjunction with clinical partners, and their design and implementation will be further optimised using finite element modelling.