GLOBAL - Advanced Materials for Energy and Sustainable Manufacturing

This project of 12 months duration will develop and extend research collaboration between Cambridge and Bangalore in the areas of materials for energy and sustainable manufacturing. Many of the challenges associated with this field must be addressed through research breakthroughs in materials performance, in the efficient use of materials and in efficient processing. Both Cambridge and Bangalore have broad strengths in the underpinning basic science, and both are working out how to provide appropriate coordination and organisation of research to bring early-stage science rapidly through to engineering and to translation to manufacturing. The global objective, therefore, of this project will be to develop together structures that allow the essential 'bottom up' basic science to be placed within an institution-wide context, and to enable new coordinated research between the two institutions.

Five research projects will be built off some of the current one-on-one links between researchers in Cambridge and in Bangalore (the JNCASR and the IISc) in the general area of materials for energy and sustainable manufacturing. These include three where existing research relationships can be taken to new areas, and two where new relationships will be established. Connections between research projects will be explored. All projects will have significant exchange of researchers from UK to India and vice versa at various career levels. These interactions will be strengthened and broadened through the networking events and workshops in both countries. The five projects involve researchers at the Departments of Physics, Materials Science and Engineering in Cambridge, and cover the following topics: (a) Advanced Optoelectronics Materials Development, (b) Nanostructured Metal-Organic Frameworks, (c) Polythiophene-based Photovoltaics, (d) The optimisation of lightweight structural parts, based on mechanical tests in-situ inside a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), and (e) Sustainable Materials Processing of Strategic Metals.

This project has been selected in Cambridge to support a key strategic objective - to build research relationships with India.

Through its academic partnerships with India, Cambridge is working to address global challenges and contribute to a sustainable future. The University's India strategy will be delivered through a network of world-leading collaborations in key fields (including translational medicine and drug discovery, innovation and entrepreneurship), with each partnership focused on the application of fundamental research to provide sustainable, low-cost solutions to shared challenges. Enhancing collaborations with IISc and JNCASR in energy and sustainable manufacturing will strengthen this common endeavour and deepen the ties between Cambridge and Bangalore, two of the world's leading centres for science and innovation.

The overarching objective is to use the resource made available from this grant to generate momentum and coordination to define Cambridge's coordinated research engagement with India in the area of materials. This will be achieved through a number of actions within the programme:

Project 2(a) will develop the rapidly developing strengths in chemical synthesis in Bangalore (Patil is one of several very able younger researchers there) with the experience of organic semiconductor science in Cambridge. Exploitation through Cambridge Display Technology for advances in LED devices is likely.

Project 2(b) will develop new metal-organic-framework materials that incorporate conducting graphene. These may provide inter alia very interesting structures for novel battery and supercapacitor structures.

Project 2(c) will provide resource to Prof Steiner for the development of polymer-templated gyroid structures to solar cells, and he will gain value from the excellent device physics group at the JNCASR. The particular target proposed will allow examination of some general design aspects for these structures.

Project 2(d) will bring to the Cambridge group a wider range of novel framework structures with potentially valuable mechanical properties. One of the very interesting prospects is the linkage between these mechanical properties and the use of such structures in functional semiconductor structures as explored in 2(c).

Project 2(e) is a smaller project intended to bring approaches developed separately in Cambridge and Bangalore to the efficient use of toxic and/or scarce elements to new materials systems. The objective is to develop new prospects for materials systems not yet studied that will form the basis for new collaborations between Cambridge and Bangalore.

Workshops: A very important part of the programme is the holding of two workshops (for which funding is requested), one in Cambridge and one in Bangalore. The PI and the Co-Is from Cambridge will attend these; in addition invitations will be made to key academics and industrialist in the wider communities in the UK and India. These workshops provide several functions. Firstly, they bring researchers together to review and discuss on-going research (which provides the grounding needed for constructive meetings). Secondly, they will be used to develop ideas for future research collaboration, both at the one-to-one project level, but also at the institutional level where larger scale plans for strategic organisation of research will be considered.