To investigate and resolve electronic circuit welding issues arising from increasing performance demands for mission critical batteries that operate in severe environments

This Orkney Island -based, innovative project will create the UK's first low-carbon aviation test environment, based at a licenced island airport with all year round scheduled air service operations to UK, and regular off-shore oil and gas helicopter traffic. The Sustainable Aviation Test Environment (SATE) will be a UK first and, should one or more of the new aviation technologies be adopted for island use, it will also help improve the quality of life of the communities it serves (through job creation, improved access to education and healthcare, etc.). The SATE will place the UK at the vanguard of the adoption of next-generation aircraft, and spearheading aviation's response to climate change. The continued demand for aviation services (air passenger numbers on the 11 HIAL airport network have increased by 33% in the last 10 years) , is at odds with the effects of an international climate emergency. We need to rapidly decarbonise the aviation sector to reconcile these competing imperatives and to reduce the carbon footprint of air travellers. Indeed, if aviation is to be used as a means to improve the quality of life and maintain or grow the population of remote and rural communities, then the options for the appropriate sustainable aviation technologies must be explored. The options include the following: * aircraft (with electric, hydrogen, or synthetic fuel replacing conventional fossil fuels), * changes to the physical airport infrastructure to support the adopted technologies, and transport to the airport * green energy supply for terminal buildings and ground operations, * necessary digital networks for resilient communication between airport and aircraft (particularly UAVs). Kirkwall Airport is one of an 11-airport, regional airport group, operated by **HIAL** - who are project lead -, and is particularly suited as a test environment location due to the variety of routes it offers which include: short hops to the inter- islands airfields, eg Westray - best known for being one of the two airports joined by the shortest scheduled flight in the world -, and operated by **Orkney Island Council.** In addition there are regular air services to Aberdeen, Edinburgh & Glasgow, with a summer service to Norway. The project team includes technology developers who will be test ready during the 18 months of this project phase: **Ampaire**, **ZeroAvia**, **Windracers**, **Flarebright** and **Loganair**. Orkney provides options to fly over water, in a challenging environment & climate, for real-world application testing of the technologies. Decarbonisation of the airport, as part of this project, is important to the Orkney community, which is an exemplar early-adopter for other low-carbon technology, and are leaders in decarbonisation, lead by one of the SATE project members, Orkney-based **EMEC**. This test environment offers a number of integrated energy-system opportunities providing significant wider impacts for potential adoption at other regional airports, which is a focus of team member **HITRANS**. The supply chain and future business opportunity interests are represented by Caithness-based battery manufacturers - **Denchi Group** and Orkney-based **Cloudnet ,**specialists in providing digital services for poorly served rural communities. The people skills necessary to support the development, testing and maintenance of the new technologies are of interest to project team members - **Air Training Services** and the **UHI**. If successful, this project should stimulate inward investment and local supply chain business opportunities in this remote part of the UK, a key responsibility for **Highlands & Islands Enterprise.** Local community acceptance of new aircraft technology, especially on lifeline services, and the potential impact on their local economy and wellbeing will also be measured, and a local community engagement programme is key to this projects success.

"The Government's Faraday programme is supporting an important new research project to improve the safety of batteries for use in electric vehicles and as stationary power sources. Businesses Jaguar Land Rover, Denchi Power, 3M, Potenza, Lifeline and Tri-Wall are pooling resources with academics and experts at the University of Warwick and the Health and Safety Executive to ensure public safety in the age of electric motoring. Electrically-powered vehicles and battery storage installations thankfully have a good safety record in the UK, but engineers and academics involved in battery design are taking no chances. Lithium-Ion battery cells have the potential to catch fire aggressively, and with consumers demanding that batteries give them further range and faster charging, there is an urgent need to develop an understanding of how such ""thermal runaway"" (TR) events may be triggered, suppressed and contained. The use of improved prevention materials, methods and mechanisms and a focus on identifying and detecting all early signs of risks, will ensure that fires can be prevented, or if necessary isolated and suppressed before they spread. Project LIBRIS seeks to improve understanding of the range of potential causes of TR in individual battery cells and through scaling up tests and scientific understanding, develop better computational models for assessing the spread of TR within battery packs. The team will use real vehicle and stationary Lithium-Ion battery designs and applications to model theoretical work and will take forward the most effective innovations into newly designed packs which will be tested to make sure that the inventions actually work. The group will then use this experience to develop standard tests for assessing the effectiveness of any future battery fire prevention mechanisms, thus assisting the next generation of work on this vital issue. The project will lead to better battery pack design and control software, better fire sensing equipment, more use of innovative flame-retardant materials and better packaging for batteries in transport and during storage. It will create business opportunities and investment in the UK, whilst also contributing to public safety. It will also build UK public sector capability to influence future international safety standards and regulations, so that safety remains paramount, but is science-based and not used as an artificial excuse for trade barriers."

"Battery pack designs vary significantly depending on applications and requires careful consideration of the selection of suitable cells as well as materials to make packs such as housings and coolant systems. The increasing diversity of cell chemistries and the already expansive material selection choices for structural components, means that the design space for battery packs is extremely broad. There are several computation tools which aid detailed design of battery packs, however, there are seldom tools which have a holistic view of the battery pack design process from chemistry selection to pack design. The MAT2BAT project will combine Granta's experience of developing material selection design tools with Imperial College London's and Denchi Power's battery knowledge to develop a holistic design tool to explore a growing design space to enable innovative designs. In a time when there is a lack of skilled battery engineers, the MAT2BAT tool will aid in the accelerated development programmes of battery packs for both students and non-battery engineers alike to fill the skills gap."

"Innovate UK has the opportunity to enable UK-based electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers to avoid costly, premature disposal of used EV batteries by repacking cells into second-life packs for use in a novel generation of cheaper solar home energy systems (SHS) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Specifically, support from the Faraday Challenge will catalyse the adoption of a state of the art diagnostic tool to reuse what EV auto manufacturers deem 'waste' batteries for a new product. After 8-10 years' of use, these lithium ion batteries (LIB) are no longer fit for EV performance, yet they still possess 70-80% of remaining capacity, making them valuable for a second-life application. This is critical to the industry, as the number of plug-in hybrid and EVs sold in the UK is expected to increase by 70% from 2016 to 2021 (MarketLine Industry, June 2017). However, the barrier preventing battery repurposing is a robust methodology to build reliable second-life packs with acceptable lifetime expectations. As a solution, Imperial College has developed a low-cost, innovative diagnostic tool needed to catalyse the market of second-life battery packs. To test its efficacy, Denchi Power can combine this tool with existing industry tests to build improved second-life battery packs for use in solar home systems (SHS). M-KOPA, the global leader in pay-as-you-go SHS, can then prove this concept within its 500,000 customer base in SSA. In summary, the ABLE project aims to ""re-juice"", reuse and recycle end of life batteries from the UK-based EV industry to extract more value from LIB cells. Specifically, ABLE will ""re-juice"" discarded packs by filtering useful cells using an innovative diagnostic tool developed by Imperial; reuse them in second-life applications such as M-KOPA's SHS; and ultimately recycle them once they have exhausted all useable capacity. If successful, Innovate UK will enable the UK automotive industry to dramatically reduce its environmental footprint and costs by avoiding premature disposal of LIBs, equip battery pack designers with needed tools to develop and commercialise innovative products, and support the impact of SHS providers by lowering the price of systems thus opening the market to the 1.2 billion individuals in the world without electricity."

The HyFES (Hybrid Fusion Energy System) is a business led, collaborative project to further improve the benefits (lower fuel costs, reduced emissions) marine vessels gain from switching to a hybrid propulsion systems. HyFES is at the hub of an intelligent sensor network incorporating propulsion batteries, hotel/standby batteries and through the installation of Dynamic Resource Monitor (DRM) sensors, any other electrical equipment including engines and generators. HyFES will fuse together model and data based prognostic algorithms with algorithms designed to ensure optimal operation of system assets to ensure vessels make operational decisions based on through life costs of assets rather than focusing solely on fuel saving. The project brings together a consortium that spans the complete supply chain including Heriot-Watt and Southampton Universities, the High Speed Sustainable Manufacturing Institute (HSSMI), Custom and Contract Power Solutions (CCPS), Denchi Power, FM and MBNA Thames Clippers.