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Clean energy needs to be stored in an efficient and safe configuration to help improve the environment. Li-ion batteries still dominate the electrochemical energy storage market, however, they have disadvantages of relatively high cost, potential explosion and complicated manufacture. The demands for more sustainable and safer battery technologies are constantly increasing and the utilisation of energy storage devices under severe environments are required to satisfy practical applications. Aqueous battery systems have remarkable potential as next-generation energy storage devices because the cost of raw materials can be reduced, the battery can be fabricated in a more sustainable and facile process and explosive accidents can be avoided. Zn-ion batteries in aqueous/hydrogel electrolyte are favourable candidates due to their relatively low cost and safety advantages. Importantly, Zn-ion batteries can be a ready-to-use technique for all battery companies as they can use the same battery fabrication facilities as Li-ion batteries. However, the specific capacity, energy and power density of current Zn-ion batteries are restricted due to the relatively large hydrated zinc ions and high polarization of bivalent zinc ions. Therefore, the development on the cathodes of Zn-ion batteries have been motivated. Manganese oxide-based materials are favourable due to their suitable structures, abundant and cost-effective properties, environmentally friendly nature and a large working voltage window. But the problems such as limited intercalated channels, poor stability during battery charge/discharge processes, unclarified and complicated mechanism and low electron conductivity of manganese oxide-based cathodes need to be solved, thus the innovation of structures for manganese oxide-based cathodes calls for further exploration. In the SENSE project, manganese-based cathode materials coupled with suitable hydrogel electrolytes for Zn-ion batteries will be designed via multi-level structural engineering to utilise them under harsh conditions, for the purpose of innovating inexpensive and high-performance devices. Through collaborations with both academic and industrial partners, state-of-the-art materials and device characterisation techniques will be used to understand the underlying mechanisms for battery behaviours. After successfully fulfilling SENSE, Zn-ion batteries can exhibit a volumetric energy density of > 650 Wh L-1 and a power density of > 220 W L-1. The energy price of which can be estimated as £50/kWh, lower than that of Li-ion batteries (£126/kWh), and Ni-Fe batteries (£58/kWh). Therefore, SENSE will not only help advance the quality of battery research and innovative efforts in the UK, but also strengthen and stimulate the development of new technologies in the UK battery industry.

The Internet of Things (IoT) underpins our future smart world where various electronic devices could be integrated with, and controlled by, wireless communication. Many of these devices will be standalone or portable, creating an urgent demand for off-grid power sources. Photovoltaic (PV) cells have significant potential for the purpose of recycling indoor artificial light to power the wireless electronics that form the basis of the IoT. However, there are currently two obstacles facing the use of conventional crystalline Silicon solar cells in this application: (i) they are optimised to work with sunlight, whose spectral output is very different to artificial indoor lighting and (ii) they perform poorly in diffuse, low intensity light that is typical of indoor lighting. Here we present a new concept for indoor-light harvesting based on luminescent waveguide encoded lattices (LWELS). These are intricate photonic devices containing embedded lumophores within a planar polymer film that contains multiple waveguide channels. The LWEL is placed on the surface of a finished solar cell, where its roles to (i) convert incident light into energies that a better matched to the solar cell, (ii) provide a wide field of view to capture as much light as possible and (iii) work efficiently in diffuse light. The aim of this project is to understand the fundamental structure-property function relationships that underpin the design of an efficient LWEL. This includes designing and making LWELs with different waveguide patterns, modelling and measuring the light transport pathways within the device and testing the performance under indoor lighting when integrated with solar cells. Our ultimate goal through understanding these relationships is to demonstrate a functional LWEL prototype that enhances the performance of silicon solar cells under diffuse artificial lighting. Our hope is that this will unleash the potential of silicon solar cells for indoor photovoltaics and unlock exciting new research and commercial opportunities for applications in the IoT.

How do ecosystems arrange themselves in space? This is a core question for understanding how to conserve species, maintain biodiversity, and ensure that ecosystems are still functioning to provide services on which humanity depends (such as food, water, and air). Often, ecosystems incorporate a large variety of moving and interacting animals. Think of the various large mammal species moving on the Serengeti Plains, or the myriad animal species on a coral reef. As they move and interact with one another (as well as the more static plant species) they form arrangements in space. These can take the form of aggregations of symbiotic populations, segregations of competitors, or more complex patterns that can fluctuate in time and space. These spatial arrangements are not, of course, planned in a "top down" fashion. Rather they emerge as a natural consequence of the movements and interactions of individual animals going about their daily lives. By building mathematical models of these movements and interactions, we can understand and predict the spatial distributions that ought to arise from different interaction scenarios. For example, suppose individuals from one species have a tendency to move towards areas where there are members of another, mutualist species, whilst at the same time individuals from the latter species like to move towards areas inhabited by the former. Then mathematical models can answer the question: how strong do these attractive tendencies have to be so that both species aggregate in a smaller part of space than they might otherwise occupy? Or suppose we have a more complicated system, with multiple species, some of which are attracted to one another, some of which repel each other, and others that have asymmetric movement tendencies (e.g. one chases the other and the latter retreats). What sort of spatial distribution of the various species will emerge? Will it stabilise in time, so that certain species occupy one part of space and others occupy different areas? Or will the distributions be in perpetual flux, continually changing over time? This proposal aims to provide a general theory for answering such questions, using a mathematical formalism called a "multi-species aggregation equation". Present understanding of animal species distributions typically centres around understanding how they are correlated with relatively static environmental features, such as topography and vegetation cover. Here, instead, we will show how between-population movement responses can lead to the spontaneous formation of a wide range of spatio-temporal distributions. We aim to classify these, relating qualitative features of the emergent patterns to underlying movement-and-interaction processes. We will also examine so-called "hysteresis" effects, whereby different patterns can emerge from the same underlying processes, dependent upon the recent history of spatio-temporal patterns. This work has the potential to change the way the scientific community thinks about how animal species are distributed in space, by shifting focus from static environmental covariates to non-linear feedbacks in animal movement mechanisms. If successful, this could give rise to much better-informed decisions regarding spatial conservation and interventions to maintain biodiversity. The project gives a core example of the vital importance of a mechanistic, mathematical approach in understanding ecological phenomena.

There is an extremely high demand for laboratory-based blood tests from community settings in the UK and analysis suggests an important role in the future for remote blood monitoring that would enable patients and health professionals to carry out their own tests remotely, greatly benefiting patients and speeding up decision making. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the need for remote and connected blood testing that is beyond the online virtual clinics in the NHS outpatient setting. In current blood testing services for community healthcare, it is challenging to obtain and process blood samples outside of the clinical setting without training and lab facilities, and patients are required to attend a GP surgery or hospital for tests with travel burden and infection risk. Many blood analyses are done in batches that take a long time to build up, meaning the speed of blood sample analysis of routine tests and time taken for diagnosis are further challenges. Despite recent innovations in point of care, current blood analysis tools in practice are mainly mechanical or labour-intensive that require extensive filtering and manual tweaking and not suitable for regular at-home monitoring and longitudinal analytics. There is no personalised real-time approach available to inform disease complexity and conditions over time, which are critical for early detection of acute diseases and the management of chronic conditions. In England, around 95% of clinical pathways rely on patients having access to efficient, timely and cost-effective pathology services and there are 500 million biochemistry and 130 million haematology tests are carried out per year. This means inefficient and infrequent blood testing leads to late diagnosis, incomplete knowledge of disease progression and potential complications in a wide range of populations. Taking those challenges into account and current digital transformation in healthcare, this is a timely opportunity to bring researchers, clinicians and industrialist together to address the challenges of blood monitoring and analytics. The proposed Network+ will build an interdisciplinary community that will explore future blood testing solutions to achieve remote, inclusive, rapid, affordable and personalised blood monitoring, and address the above challenges in community health and care. To achieve the Network+ vision, research of technologies will be conducted from collaborations among information and communication technology (ICT), data and analytical science, clinical science, applied optics, biochemistry, engineering and social sciences in the Network+. The network will address three key technical challenges in blood testing: Remote monitoring, ICT, Personalised data and AI in a range of examplar clinical areas including cancer, autoimmune diseases, sickle cell disease, preoperative care, pathology services and general primary care.

The proposed research aims to develop an innovative mitigation device to protect the next-generation onshore and offshore wind farms from dynamic loading caused by extreme natural events. In 2020, 20% of the UK's electricity was obtained from wind using both onshore and offshore windfarms. In order to increase this percentage and help the UK address its climate change target, new wind farms, with taller and larger wind turbines, and situated in more extreme locations are planned. Projections of growth also indicate the expansion into emerging markets and construction of new wind farms in developing countries. Therefore, these next-generation wind turbines will have to cope with harsher climate conditions induced by stronger storms and taller sea waves, and extreme events such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Several simplifying assumptions used for the design of previous generations of wind turbines can no longer be applied and new critical factors and uncertainties linked to power-generation efficiency and structural safety will emerge, affecting their resilience and life-cycle. The particular area of focus of this research is the traditional transition piece of a wind turbine, which is a structural element that connects the tower with its foundation and will have to tolerate extreme stresses induced by dynamic loading during extreme natural events. The aim is to replace the traditional connector with a novel mechanical joint of hourglass shape, termed an Hourglass Lattice Structure (HLS). This innovation will combine the unique features of two proven technologies extremely effective in seismic engineering, namely the "reduced beam section" approach and the "rocking foundation" design. In particular, the proposed HLS device, because of its hourglass shape, will facilitate the rocking behaviour in order to create a highly dissipating "fuse" which will protect the wind tower and foundation. Performance of the novel proposed device on the structural life-cycle risk will be assessed through analytical, numerical, and experimental investigation by using, as a measure of efficiency, the levelized cost of energy (LCOE), namely the cost per unit of energy based on amortized capital cost over the project life. In addition, experimental testing of offshore small-scale wind turbines will be carried out by means of an innovative test rig, the first-ever underwater shake-table hosted in a hydraulic flume that will be deployed, calibrated, and used to simulate multi-hazard scenarios such as those recently discovered and dubbed "stormquakes". The successful outcome of this timely project will allow next-generation wind turbines to be more resilient and cost effective so that wind energy can develop as a competitive renewable energy resource with less need for government subsidy. The inclusion of industrial partners in all stages of the project ensures that the technical developments will be included in commercial devices for a medium-long term impact.

When we begin to study mathematics, we learn that the operation of multiplication on numbers satisfies some basic rules. One of these rules, known as associativity, says that for any three numbers a, b and c, we get the same result if we multiply a and b and then multiply the result by c or if we multiply a by the result of multiplying b and c. This leads to the abstract algebraic notion of a monoid, which is a set (in this case the set of natural numbers) equipped with a binary operation (in this case multiplication) that is associative and has a unit (in this case the number 1). If we continue to study mathematics, we encounter a new kind of multiplication, no longer on numbers but on sets, which is known as Cartesian product. Given two sets A and B, their Cartesian product is the set A x B whose elements are the ordered pairs (a, b), where a is an element of A and b is an element of B. Pictorially, the Cartesian product of two sets is a grid with coordinates given by the elements of the two sets. This operation satisfies some rules, analogous to those for the multiplication of numbers, but a little more subtle. For example, if we are given three sets A, B and C, then the set A x (B x C) is isomorphic (rather than equal) to the set (A x B) x C. Here, being isomorphic means that we they are essentially the same by means of a one-to-one correspondence between the elements A x (B x C) and those of (A x B) x C. This construction leads to the notion of a monoidal category, which amounts to a collection of objects and maps between them (in this case the collection of all sets and functions between them) equipped with a multiplication (in this case the Cartesian product) that is associative and has a unit (in this case the one-element set) up to isomorphism. Monoidal categories, introduced in the '60s, have been extremely important in several areas of mathematics (including logic, algebra, and topology) and theoretical computer science. In logic and theoretical computer science, they connect to linear logic, in which one keeps track of the resources necessary to prove a statement. This project is about the next step in this sequence of abstract notions of multiplication, which is given by the notion of a monoidal bicategory. In a bicategory, we have not only objects and maps but also 2-maps, which can be thought of as "maps between maps" and allow us to capture how different maps relate to each other. In a monoidal bicategory, we have a way of multiplying their objects, maps and 2-maps, subject to complex axioms. Monoidal bicategories, introduced in the '90s, have potential for applications even greater than that of monoidal categories, as they allow us to keep track of even more information. We seek to realise this potential by advancing the theory of monoidal bicategories. We will prove fundamental theorems about them, develop new connections to linear logic and theoretical computer science and investigate examples that are of interest in algebra and topology. Our work connects to algebra via an important research programme known as "categorification", which is concerned with replacing set-based structures (like monoids) with category-based structures (like monoidal categories) in order to obtain more subtle invariants. Our work links to topology via the notion of an operad, which is a flexible tool used to describe algebraic structures in which axioms do not hold as equalities, but rather up to weak forms of isomorphism. Overall, this project will bring the theory of monoidal bicategories to a new level and promote interdisciplinary research within mathematics and with theoretical computer science.

The Committee on Climate Change suggests that we need to decarbonise all heat in buildings by 2050 to achieve the Net Zero emissions targets. The electrification of heat supply, through either direct electric heating or heat pumps, seems more likely to be realised in practice. However, the complete electrification of heat will result in much higher electricity demand in winter than in summer. Furthermore, due to the consistency of ambient temperature, it will also lead to electricity demand spikiness which is a big challenge for the grid. The HARVEST project will develop a new solution that can absorb and accumulate the curtailed/waste renewable electricity all around the year using thermochemical heat storage technology and then convert and magnify the heat output in winter and cooling output in summer using heat pump technology. The unique features of the proposed solution are: (1) the microwave-assisted process to flexibly absorb renewable electricity; and (2) the compact and efficient regeneration process by direct contact reaction between thermochemical heat storage materials and ammonia solution. We have established a strong multidisciplinary consortium, consisting of leading researchers from the University of Birmingham, the University of Edinburgh, and the University College London, to address the key challenges in both the scientific/technological aspects and social aspects. Our research will significantly contribute to several identified approaches in the 'Decarbonising Heating and Cooling 2' call document, in particular, the 'new technologies of heating and/or cooling' and 'new methods or significant developments for heat storage or cold storage'. Our research is also further supported by the UK and international partners to maximise knowledge exchange and impact delivery.