This funding will be vitally important in terms of enabling what we do with advanced materials to be enhanced both in terms of upstream university work but also in its industrial application
- Professor Sir Richard Friend
The new funding is part of a £128million Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) investment in the Sir Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials, which comprises seven partner Universities including Manchester, Oxford and Imperial College London.
Cambridge’s award will enable the University to purchase additional equipment to support its leadership of the Royce Institute’s Materials for Energy Efficient Information and Communications Technology initiative. This will focus on improving energy storage technologies, reducing power consumption and developing new materials and devices able to harness energy from the environment.
The new equipment will enable Cambridge researchers to fabricate new energy-efficient devices, such as batteries and solar cells, and to undertake the advanced characterisation of materials and machines. These techniques will, in turn, help to hasten the development of energy technologies that are safer and more efficient, including longer-life phone batteries and electric cars with extended ranges .
Much of the Royce Equipment will be housed within the Maxwell Centre, in the Cavendish Laboratory (Department of Physics), which is famous for the discovery of the structure of DNA (Crick and Watson), but brings together researchers from Engineering, Materials Science and Chemistry.
Read the full story
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
_________________________________________________