Taken together the imaging Facilities on the Rutherford Campus will be without equal anywhere in the world. The suite of synchrotron X-ray, neutron, laser, electron, lab. X-ray, and NMR imaging available promises an unprecedented opportunity to obtain information about material structure and behaviour. This infrastructure provides an opportunity to undertake science changing experiments. We need to be able to bring together the insights from different instruments to follow structural evolution under realistic environments and timescales to go beyond static 3D images by radically increasing the dimensionality of information available. This project will use many beamlines at Diamond and ISIS, combining them with laser and electron imaging capability on site, but especially exploiting the 3.3M investment by Manchester into a new imaging beamline at Diamond that will complete in Spring 2012.Traditionally a 3D images are reconstructed from hundreds or thousands of 2D images (projections) taken as the object is rotated. This project will:1) Deliver 3D movies of materials behaviour. 2) Move from essentially black and white images to colour images that reveal the elements inside the material and their chemical state which will be really useful for studying fuel cells and batteries.3) Create multidimensional images by combining more than one method (e.g. lasers and x-rays) to create an image. Each method is sensitive to different aspects.4) Establish an In situ Environments Lab and a Tissue Regeneration lab at the Research Complex. The former so that we can study sample behaviour in real time on the beam line; the latter so that we can study the cell growth and regeneration on new biomaterials. A key capability if we are to develop more effective hard (e.g. artificial hip) and soft tissue (artificial cartilage) replacements.These new methods will provide more detail about a very wide range of behaviours, but we will focus our experiments on materials for Energy and Biomaterials. In the area of energy it will enable us to:Recreate the conditions operating inside a hydrogen fuel cell (1000C) to find out how they degrade in operation leading to better fuel cells for cars and other applicationsStudy the charging and discharging of Li batteries to understand better why their performance degrades over their lifetime.Study thermal barriers that protect turbine blades from the aggressive environments inside an aeroengine to develop more efficient engines.Study the sub-surface corrosion of aircraft alloys and nuclear pressure vessels under realistic conditions improving safetyStudy in 3D how oil is removed from the pores in rocks and how we might more efficiently store harmful CO2in rocks.In the area of biomaterials it will enable us to recreate the conditions under which cells attach to new biomaterials and to follow their attachment and regeneration using a combination of imaging methods (laser, electron and x-ray) leading to:Porous hard tissue replacements (bone analogues) made from bio-active glasses with a microstructure to encourage cell attachmentSoft fibrous tissue replacements for skin, cartilage, tendon. These will involve sub-micron fibres arranged in ropes and mats.Of course the benefits of the multi-dimensional imaging we will establish at Harwell will extend much further. It will provide other academics and industry from across the UK with information across time and lengthscales not currently available. This will have a dramatic effect on our capability to follow behaviour during processing and in service.

Research into solid adsorbents for CO2 is motivated by their potential advantages over liquid amine, membrane or cryogenic separation techniques in mid-high temperature CO2 separation, for example, in hydrogen production via steam reforming/gasification of waste biomass where production yields are increased through the use of a sorbent powder such as CaO that chemically binds the CO2 from the mixed product stream and shifts the reaction thermodynamics to increase hydrogen output. There are also applications in large scale CO2 capture involving integration with fossil fuel fired power stations, and other industries. This materials engineering based proposal addresses the major problem facing utilisation of powder sorbents such as CaO for high temperature applications, including hydrogen production by sorbent enhanced steam reforming (SESR) of waste biomass. A decay in CO2 capture performance due to changes in the structure of the powder bed (densification) during regeneration at high temperatures prevents full exploitation of this promising technology in SESR and large scale CO2 capture applications. Significant powder densification occurs after heat-treatments at > 800 C to release CO2 and regenerate the sorbent. This leads to loss of porosity and sorbent surface area, causing a serious decay in CO2 capture performance. Developments in recent years, for example, adding refractory spacer particles are only successful for non-optimal regeneration conditions (e.g. < 850 C in inert atmospheres). The powders to be developed in this 18 month feasibility study will exploit a novel means of counteracting densification and loss of surface area, aiming to achieve regeneration at 950 C (much higher than for existing sorbents) in atmospheric conditions without significant decay in CO2 sorption capacity. An important advantage of the new powders is that a near-pure CO2 stream will be generated during regeneration at 950 C, producing output streams suited to integration with CO2 storage and/or utilisation programmes; this contrasts to the mixed gas streams generated at lower temperatures using existing materials. The new approach to the durability problem is to disperse ultrafine particles of partially stabilised zirconia (PSZ) in the sorbent matrix. The PSZ particles undergo a phase transition on cooling after regeneration which results in an increase in particle (crystallite) volume. Resulting strains generated in the surrounding, partially sintered, sorbent matrix will cause microcracks and secondary strain fields to develop which will open up pore channels for ingress of gasses. Loss of CO2 capture capacity in the subsequent sorption step will thus be mitigated, even for technologically favoured high regeneration temperatures (950 C), leading to increased multi-cycle sorbent efficiency, and increased hydrogen yield in SESR. The anti-densification mechanism will also be evaluated for an alternative CO2 sorbent, Na2ZrO3.

Fuel Cells continue to receive considerable attention as clean, highly efficient devices for the production of both electricity and, for some applications, high grade waste heat. However, considerable technical challenges remain for fuel cell to achieve greater penetration into commercial markets. It is worth emphasising the shift in research landscape within which the Supergen fuel cell consortium is operating. As fuel cell technology continues to mature, the fuel cell research community is being asked to place increasing emphasis on improving its fundamental understanding of materials behaviour under realistic operating conditions and duty cycles, especially where this relates to failure modes, and materials/cell degradation. Thus the work programme of this second phase will very much focus on generic and fundamental research, targeted onto real problems identified in discussion with our industry partners. This means that during this second phase, it will remain the case that the Supergen consortium will put an emphasis on knowledge transfer to industry, though of course patents will be filed where appropriate. It is then largely the responsibility of the industry partners to exploit this knowledge in the context of their own technology programmeThe proposed second phase of the Supergen fuel cell consortium refreshes the membership, with three new academics; Kucernak (Imperial), Brett (UCL) and Elliott (Cambridge) and with four academic teams continuing; Brandon (Imperial), Scott (Newcastle), Atkinson (Imperial) and Irvine (St Andrews). All three industry partners remain within the consortium for its second phase; Rolls-Royce Fuel Cell Systems, Ceres Power and Johnson Matthey, with the addition of a fourth new industry partner, Intelligent Energy. This new team maintains the consortium strength in Solid Oxide Fuel Cells, whilst adding significant extra capacity in Polymer Fuel Cells within both the industry and academic teams. This provides a shift in emphasis within the consortium to developing an improved understanding of failure modes and performance limitations within current fuel cell devices, and the need for greater scientific understanding to tackle these failure modes. In addition the consortium will continue to deliver its training courses in fuel cell science and engineering to consortium staff and students, external researchers to the consortium and to appropriate Doctoral Training Centres and to disseminate the work of the consortium (through publication and conference presentation, including an annual open conference) and to extend its international collaboration.

The aim is to exploit a recent discovery concerning the production of a new high activity catalyst for use in the production of organic carbonates. The methodology uses a new gold catalyst supported on an acidic support. Initial results show the new catalyst is over sixty times as active as the current equivalent commercial catalyst and retains complete specificity for the carbonate product. This enhanced activity represents a step change in the manufacturing processes for these important chemical building blocks. Funding is requested to complete patent exemplification and to ensure commercial exploitation can be achieved.

This project proposes to make highly selective nano-particulate catalysts using a novel method ('biocasting') for a set of defined catalytic reactions and to develop understanding of how to control the catalyst manufacturing process to achieve the desired selectivity which is not readily achieved using chemical manufacturing alone.. Controlled growth of metal nanoparticles in various naturally occurring and modified bacteria will be used to produce the required catalysts supported on cell surfaces.Previous work, has demonstrated that bacteria can be used as a catalyst support for nanoparticulate metals, including platinum and palladium. The process involves reducing the metal enzymatically from a salt solution over a bacterial culture, with templating and stabilisation achieved using biochemical components at the living/nonliving interface, followed by post-processing, which kills the bacterial cells but retains the special catalytic properties of nanoparticles. Such materials have been shown to provide selectivity towards desirable products in catalytic reactions including double bond isomerisation and selective hydrogenation, but at present there is a lack of understanding of why this superior selectivity occurs. One factor may be the crystal structure, including the ratios of edge to terrace and corner atoms which influence the adsorption of reactants upon the catalyst surface. Another effect is the rate of diffusion of reactants to the metal surface. This proposal will develop understanding of why the nanoparticles give rise to superior catalytic selectivity, and thus will enable the rational design and production of nanoparticles for given applications. The present proposal will seek to clean the biotemplated metal particles using chemical and electrochemical methods in order to control the metal cluster morphology, and to block selectively certain active sites on the catalyst using Bi, Pb, sulphur or bacterially derived agents incorporated at the synthesis stage. By switching on or off active sites in this way and associated characterization and testing of the catalysts, it will be possible to identify which types of sites are associated with favourable selectivity in chemical transformations.The produced catalysts will be characterized using a range of techniques which will elucidate information about the nanoparticle size, shape, cluster structure, redox behaviour, electrochemical and spectroscopic behaviour (SERS, XPS, XRD, TPD, DRIFTS and CV). Catalytic selectivity will be studied in a range of selective hydrogenation and double bond isomerisation reactions. The ultimate goal is to replace Lindlar catalysts based on lead modified palladium and other transition metals with more environmentally benign alternatives; previous studies in ours and collaborators' laboratories have shown that the precious metal can be supplemented with cheap metals such as Fe and can even be sourced as such mixtures from waste and scrap for economic manufacture.Current methods for nanoparticle manufacture are not 'clean' and/or not scalable. The major advantage of biomanufacturing is its scalability; we have routinely grown several kilos of the bacteria at the 600 litre scale in our pilot plant. As part of this project we will make Bio-Pd preparations at the 30-100 litre scale (batch cultures), checking the small-scale and large-scale NP products for conserved properties, and also stock aliquots for shelf-life evaluation.