Dr Huizhi Wang, a new lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded an EPSRC-UKRI Innovation Fellowship.

The fellowship, worth £776k, will support Dr Wang’s research into new battery technologies for future electric vehicles.

EPSRC-UKRI Innovation Fellowships are three-year research awards that aim to support excellent engineering and physical sciences and establish leaders who can transcend both the academic and industrial interface.

Dr Wang’s research lies at the interface between thermofluid science and electrochemistry. She studies coupled heat, mass transfer and electrochemical reactions, linking them up with new designs of electrochemical devices for better performance.

The fellowship will enable Dr Wang to innovate in the way Li-ion battery cells are characterised, designed and managed, with the goal of improving energy and power density and reducing cost of electric-vehicle batteries.

Electric vehicles and batteries are an important part of the UK Government's Industrial Strategy. It was estimated in a KPMG report that the overall economic and social benefit of electric vehicles, connected and autonomous vehicles to the UK economy would be of the order of £51bn per year by 2030, with the potential for over 300,000 newly-created industry jobs.

The fellowship research is also supported by industrial partners (PV3 Technologies Ltd, AGM Batteries Ltd, WhEST) and academic partners (Yale University, University of Edinburgh, East China University of Science and Technology).