Professor Clare Grey has secured over £2 million with £1.4 million match-funding from industry and national laboratories for a virtual centre, in partnership with three other universities: Newcastle, St Mary’s and UCL.
The Centre of Advanced Materials for Integrated Energy Systems (CAM-IES) will have an office in the new Maxwell building on the west Cambridge site. With another £10 million from the Henry Royce Institute to spend on equipment, the centre will have three main aims:
- To create a network of materials researchers that goes beyond the four partner universities and develops into a nationwide community of scientist working on the development of advanced materials for energy conversion and energy storage
- To look at the science of new materials energy storage and, working with industry, to identify new research directions
- To provide and facilitate access to state-of-the-art equipment for the energy materials community in the UK.
Professor Grey said: “The point of the centre is to ask the question: Are there things that we can learn from the approaches to different technologies by working together? Can we discover which systems benefit from being integrated, for instance could you put a battery on the back of a solar cell? When does it make sense to integrate two devices? Or does it make more sense to work on them separately? But this funding isn’t just for research. The overarching goal of CAM-IES it to help build a UK-wide community of cross-disciplinary materials researchers focused on energy applications.”