To develop mechanical/vibrational energy harvesting devices based on low cost, environment friendly materials. Integrated into nanoscale systems to form self-powered devices, the devices are a potential game-changer for personal power generation.
96,612
2014-01-01 to 2017-06-30
Collaborative R&D
‘Power Generating & Energy Saving Windows’ is a project which addresses Innovate Uk's ‘Material Innovation for a Sustainable Economy’ call, with its objectives of reducing the energy consumption and material usage involved in the manufacturing of solar cells, while enabling a new market through the development of colourless transparent photovoltaic thermal control window glazing units, that both generate and save energy as a single multifunctional building material.
The project combines supply chain partners for Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV), including developer and producer of glazing Polysolar, PV materials specialist Merck and HVM Catapult partner CPI.
The project will be innovative in developing PV manufacturing processes, without using critically scarce materials. As well as reducing energy consumption in its life and its manufacture, the PV window product offers a significant environmental impact through power generation and savings.
0
2006-04-01 to 2008-12-31
Collaborative R&D
The project seeks to design and build a flexible robotic platform to automate incubation and processing of hundreds of mammalian cell cultures growing in shake flasks, with integrated cell growth and metabolite analysis. Shake flasks model larger scale bioreactors, have ample volume for frequent sampling for analysis and support process development and cell line stability studies.
The goal is to ensure consistent, reproducible cell processing for high throughput bioprocess research. This would facilitate systematic, parallel investigation of multiple parameters influencing cell growth or productivity, e.g. media formulation or feed regime.
"Smart" software would be developed to model the process and mimic the culture expert, and thus automatically decide how and when to process each individual culture e.g. subculture to a target cell count, or when to feed to maintain a set glucose level.