The goal of the proposed EngD Centre is to produce research leaders to tackle the major national and international challenges over the next 15 years in implementing new power plant to generate electricity more efficiently using fossil energy with near zero emissions, involving the successful demonstration of CO2 capture, and also in reducing CO2 emissions generally from coal utilisation, including iron making. These leaders will be part of the new breed of engineers that will be thoroughly versed in cutting edge energy research and capable of operating in multi-disciplinary teams, covering a range of knowledge transfer, deployment and policy roles and with the skills to analyse the overall economic context of their projects and to be aware of the social and ethical implications. This proposal has involved wide consultation with the power generation sector which has indicated that the number of doctoral researchers required in the UK for the major developments in large-scale fossil energy power generation involving efficiency improvements and CO2 capture can be estimated conservatively as 150-200 over the next ten years. The Centre will play a vital role in meeting this demand by providing training in highly relevant technological areas to the companies concerned, as well as the broader portfolio of skills required for future research leaders. Further, Doosan Babcock, Alstom, E.ON, Rolls Royce, EDF, RWE, Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), Welsh Power and Drax Power all support this bid and are willing to participate in the proposed Centre from 2009 onwards. Further, in terms of reducing CO2 emissions generally from coal utilisation, including iron making and smokeless fuel, this has drawn in other industrial partners, Corus and CPL. The innovative training programme involves a number of unique elements based around the social sciences and activities with China and is designed to ensure that the research engineers are not only thoroughly versed in cutting edge energy research but capable of operating in multi-disciplinary teams covering a range of knowledge transfer, deployment and policy roles and the ability to analyse the overall economic context of projects and to be aware of the social and ethical implications. The academic team draws upon the internationally leading fossil energy programme at Nottingham but also on colleagues at Birmingham and Loughborough for their complementary research in high temperature materials, plant life monitoring and energy economics. Given that virtually all of the research projects will benefit from using pilot-scale equipment in industry linked to the advanced analytical capabilities in the MEC and our overseas partners, together with the Group activities undertaken by the yearly cohorts, the training programme is considered to offer considerable added value over DTA project and CASE awards, as testified by the extremely high level of industrial interest in the proposed Centre across the power generation section, together with other industries involved in reducing CO2 emissions from coal utilisation.

The UK Government has an ambitious target to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050. Industrial processes account for 25% of total EU CO2 emissions, and moreover, they are already operating at or close to the theoretical limits of efficiency. Therefore, CO2 capture and storage (CCS) is the only technology that can deliver the required emission reductions. However, efficiency and capital cost penalties associated with CO2 capture are hindering the deployment of CCS. There is an opportunity here for industrial CCS to operate at a wider range of temperatures and to integrate available thermal streams with heat required for on-site sorbent regeneration. This multidisciplinary proposal unites leading engineers and scientists from the Universities of Heriot-Watt, Hull and Newcastle to realise our vision of integrating novel hydrotalcite solid sorbents with advanced heat integration processes for industrial CO2 capture. Hydrotalcite materials present a big potential for industrial CCS, as they show faster kinetics and better regenerability over other high temperature sorbents; however, their application in industrial capture processes remains largely unexplored. We will research novel methodologies to enhance and tailor performance of hydrotalcites for CO2 capture over a wide range of conditions needed in industrial processes. We will also address the challenge of designing a suitable process that combines the roles of heat management (heat recovery for desorption) and mass transfer (ad- and desorption) across a range of process conditions (temperature, pressure, humidity, gas constituents) with a degree of flexibility that is economically and technically viable.

This project will assess the potential value of hydrogen to the UK as part of a transition to a low carbon economy. It will assess the potential demand for and value of hydrogen in different markets across the energy system and will analyse the supply chain required to produce and deliver that hydrogen, including the supply of hydrogen from using electrolysers for load balancing in the UK electricity system with a high penetration of renewable electricity. In the short-term, hydrogen electrolysers can support electricity system load balancing as the proportion of intermittent renewables increases. The Universities of Edinburgh and Reading have led efforts to characterise the UK wind power resource and to understand how new developments can be incorporated into the UK electricity system. This project will extend the models developed at these institutions to assess the indirect value of hydrogen in supporting a high penetration of renewable electricity by avoiding electricity network reinforcement. It will also link these models with the UK energy system model at UCL (UK TIMES) to assess the direct value of electrolysed hydrogen to companies, if the hydrogen is used in the gas network (power-to-gas), as an industrial feedstock, as a transport fuel or for large-scale storage as part of the electricity system. The models will identify the most appropriate locations for electrolysis deployment and the timescales on which they should be deployed. In the medium-term, the most important use of hydrogen is likely to be in the transport sector. UCL has recently examined how a hydrogen supply chain might develop across the UK using a new spatially-explicit infrastructure planning model called SHIPMod. This project will add a number of new features to this model including hydrogen pipelines and finer temporal disaggregation to link with the electrolysis parts of the network models developed at Edinburgh. It will be used to assess the value of hydrogen supply infrastructure and will identify the optimum deployment of infrastructure across the UK. In the longer term, hydrogen is a zero-carbon option to replace natural gas for heat generation. UCL have examined the potential for converting the natural gas networks to use hydrogen and to examine the long-term prospects for micro-CHP to replace boilers. This project will build on this research with the aims of: (i) assessing the value of hydrogen to the UK for heat provision; (ii) understanding the impact of hydrogen on the gas distribution networks; and, (iii) examining how using hydrogen for heat as well as transport would impact the development of a hydrogen supply infrastructure. Hydrogen infrastructure represents a risky investment in the early stages of a transition because of the highly uncertain future uptake of hydrogen vehicles. It is important to factor the cost of this risk into the value of hydrogen. We will use a mixture of real options and stochastic programming analysis, using the UK TIMES energy system model and the SHIPMod infrastructure planning model, to account for and manage risk in different scenarios (including using hydrogen only for transport or using it for both transport and heat). Hence we will identify scenarios with lower investment risk and we will identify policies that will reduce these risks and facilitate the development of a hydrogen economy. This project will build on existing research projects, including using models developed by the EPSRC H2FC Supergen Hub and the EPSRC Adaptation and Resilience in Energy Systems (ARIES) project. Funding for hydrogen research in the UK is currently almost exclusively focused on technology development and this project will fill an important gap in the funding landscape by taking a whole systems approach to understanding the potential role of hydrogen in future UK low-carbon energy system configurations.

The Industrial Doctorate Centre in Molecular Modelling and Materials Science (M3S) at University College London (UCL) trains researchers in materials science and simulation of industrially important applications. As structural and physico-chemical processes at the molecular level largely determine the macroscopic properties of any material, quantitative research into this nano-scale behaviour is crucially important to the design and engineering of complex functional materials. The M3S IDC is a highly multi-disciplinary 4-year EngD programme, which works in partnership with a large base of industrial sponsors on a variety of projects ranging from catalysis to thin film technology, electronics, software engineering and bio-physics research. The four main research themes within the Centre are 1) Energy Materials and Catalysis; 2) Information Technology and Software Engineering; 3) Nano-engineering for Smart Materials; and 4) Pharmaceuticals and Bio-medical Engineering. These areas of research align perfectly with EPSRC's mission programmes: Energy, the Digital Economy, and Nanoscience through Engineering to Application. In addition, per definition an industrial doctorate centre is important to EPSRC's priority areas of Securing the Future Supply of People and Towards Better Exploitation. Students at the M3S IDC follow a tailor-made taught programme of specialist technical courses, as well as professionally accredited project management courses and transferable skills training, which ensures that whatever their first degree, on completion all students will have obtained thorough technical and managerial schooling as well as a doctoral research degree. The EngD research is industry-led and of comparable high quality and innovation as the more established PhD research degree. However, as the EngD students spend approximately 70% of their time on site with the industrial sponsor, they also gain first hand experience of the demanding research environment of a successful, competitive industry. Industrial partners who have taken up the opportunity during the first phase of the EngD programme to add an EngD researcher to their R&D teams include Johnson Matthey, Pilkington Glass, Exxon Mobil, Silicon Graphics, Accelrys and STS, while new companies are added to the pool of sponsors each year. Materials research in UCL is particularly well developed, with a thriving Centre for Materials Research and a newly established Materials Chemistry Centre. In addition, the Bloomsbury campus has perhaps the largest concentration of computational materials scientists in the UK, if not the world. Although affiliated to different UCL departments, all computational materials researchers are members of the UCL Materials Simulation Laboratory, which is active in advancing the development of common computational methodologies and encouraging collaborative research between the members. As such, UCL has a large team of well over a hundred research-active academic staff available to supervise research projects, ensuring that all industrial partners will be able to team up with an academic in a relevant research field to form the supervisory team to work with the EngD student. The success of the existing M3S Industrial Doctorate Centre and the obvious potential to widen its research remit and industrial partnerships into new, topical materials science areas, which are at the heart of EPSRC's strategic funding priorities for the near future, has led to this proposal for the funding of 5 annual cohorts of ten EngD students in the new phase of the Centre from 2009.

Adsorption technology by which gas streams can be purified and separated is essential for many key industries, including those in the oil and gas, chemicals, manufacturing and medical sectors. As a result, solid adsorbents are worth £2.4 billion per year, some 10% of the total industrial gas market. Furthermore, adsorption can offer green, energy-efficient routes to environmental applications, including carbon capture from power generation and other industrial sources. Typically, adsorption is achieved via pressure swing and temperature swing adsorption processes with cycle times of minutes or more. New kinetic-based adsorption technologies, using rotating valves, rotary wheel adsorbers and novel thin layer adsorbent structures can reduce the equipment footprint and increase the efficiency of these processes of gas separation so that, for example, pure gas can be generated on site rather than centrally, with the distribution costs associated with that. Zeolites, microporous aluminosilicates, make up over 30% of industrial adsorbents by value. Their well ordered and robust framework structures impart high selectivity by both molecular sieving and thermodynamics-based separation. Although over 200 zeolitic structure types are known, only a very few find widespread application as adsorbents, in part due to the economics of their synthesis. In our recent EPSRC-funded research, we have indentified two new mechanisms by which very high adsorption selectivity can be achieved. The first mechanism is via a chemoselective 'trapdoor' effect, in which cations occupying window sites only permit diffusion of molecules (such as CO2) that interact strongly with them. The second mechanism makes use of the flexibility of some structures in response to the composition of their extra-framework cations, so that their structure and cation composition can be modified to fine-tune molecular sieving via 'cation-controlled molecular sieving'. In this ambitious project we will develop gas separation by these two mechanism by zeolites not commonly used as adsorbents, including some recently reported by us as CO2 adsorbents in 'Nature'. Their potential advantages of new zeolites in kinetic-based separations (including a requirement for an order of magnitude less material) can enable much higher specific production costs to be tolerated. Consequently, the number of potential zeolite candidates for adsorption is increased. To develop these new materials and make possible this step change in adsorbent technology, we have assembled a research team comprising materials chemists, computational modellers and chemical engineers as well as industrial partners in zeolite adsorption and gas adsorption. Materials chemistry will be used to modify and optimise the chemical structure of chosen zeolite frameworks and also their texture (particle size, hierarchical porosity) for target gas separations, and the performance of these new compositions will be measured and modelled macroscopically by chemical engineers. Multiscale computational modelling (via a range of techniques of different levels of theory) will give a detailed picture of the mechanisms and so provide feedback to inform the experimental studies. This will result in greater understanding of the relationship of chemical structure and dynamics to the adsorption properties. In concert with this, ongoing discussion with industrial project partners at project meetings will enable the practical development and exploitation of a new generation of zeolite-based adsorbents for industrial and environmental applications.