A team from Imperial have won funding for six new battery research projects

Researchers from Imperial College London have secured funding from Innovate UK to support research on a wide range of battery technologies.

Imperial College London’s Electrochemical Science & Engineering group has won £1.4m to fund six projects investigating the issues around batteries for electric vehicles. The team is based in both the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Dyson School of Design Engineering and this latest announcement follows their successful bid to help found a new national battery research centre.

Led by Dr Greg Offer and Dr Billy Wu, the team applied to two Innovate UK competitions related to the Faraday Challenge, which is part to the Government’s Industrial Strategy. The two calls were Innovation - research and development and Innovation - feasibility studies.

All 27 winning projects were announced by the Rt Hon Greg Clark MP, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy at Battery and Energy Storage Show in Warwick.

The Imperial projects have specific research and development goals and many of them feature key industrial collaborators. They will begin in January 2018, and will run for one year with the exception of BATMAN, which will run for three years.

Part of the presentation given by Greg Clark MP

“To be selected as part of the team shaping the Faraday Institution was exciting for us,” says Dr Offer from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, “but delivering the research is even more important and these projects give us the resources to work with industry and lay the foundations for a stronger and bigger battery industry in the UK.”

The projects will start hiring soon. If you are interested in working with the team email Dr Greg Offer and Dr Billy Wu.

The full details of the six projects can be found below.

• BATMAN
  The advanced BAttery Thermal MANagement project is a collaboration with Perkins and AVID Technologies. The project will develop the next generation of battery packs with significantly extended lifetimes for industrial machinery and road vehicles. Imperial will receive £715k funding over three years to support this work.

• ATTESTS
  The Automotive Technology Transfer of Energy Storage Thermal Strategies project is a collaboration with Rolls Royce. The project will investigate the feasibility of new battery module designs to extend battery life for marine applications and road vehicles with similar load profiles. Imperial will receive £163k funding to support this work.

• CoRuBa
  The Cool Running Battery project is a collaboration with FAC Technology. The project will develop novel materials for advanced thermal management systems for battery packs. Imperial will receive £122k funding to support this work.

• IMPACT
  The IMproved Power bAttery Cooling Technology project is a one year feasibility study in collaboration with Arcola Energy, Reaction Engines, Flint Engineering and Brunel University London. It is being led at Imperial by Dr Billy Wu with Dr. Greg Offer and Dr. Sam Cooper. The project aims to understand the effect of heat and the impact of cooling on a new breed of batteries made from lithium titanate cells. Imperial will receive £172k of funding to support this work.

• ABLE
  The Advanced Battery Life Extension project is in collaboration with M-Kopa and Denchi Power. Led at Imperial by Dr Billy Wu and Dr. Sam Cooper, ABLE aims to extend a technique developed at Imperial College London to help repurpose old batteries from electric vehicles for use as am energy storage solution in a solar home system. Imperial will receive £165k funding over the 1 year feasibility period to support this work.

• Thermal Hazard Technology
  The Thermal Hazard Technology project will develop novel methods of thermal management for laboratory testing of lithium ion batteries. Imperial will receive £146k funding over three years to support this work.