Loughborough University EPSRC Capital Award for Core Equipment

Our well-equipped and well-supported existing laboratory provision is integral to our research strategy, featuring particularly prominently across our EPSRC portfolio. It is a foundational aspect of our research ethos that we provide our researchers with the tools and environments they need to flourish. We intend to use this block grant to invest in three pieces of strategically important equipment which will enhance these facilities and benefit academics across departments within a range of EPS disciplines, thus meeting the underpinning multi-user equipment objective of this call.

Three items of underpinning multi-user equipment will be purchased via this grant.
- 100kW Battery Emulator System
- Ion Milling System
- Accelerated Infrastructure Ageing Simulator

The requested equipment underpins many of the 64 current EPSRC grants, worth over £56m, which are currently held at Loughborough University (LU). The equipment will enable and accelerate primarily fundamental research across multiple disciplines; hence the early beneficiaries of the equipment will be researchers in Loughborough and our academic collaborators. Outside of the academic community, the main users and beneficiaries of the equipment will be industrial users (both through collaborative research and commercial use).

This award will be used to facilitate the development of high quality research by enabling Loughborough academics to establish broader, multi-disciplinary collaborations with industrial and academic partners, that will benefit from usage of the equipment. These collaborations will ensure that research is novel and timely and leads to:
- Enhanced impact
- Higher quality publications
- Ability to attract high calibre PhD students and improved research experience
- Increased volume of successful grant applications to a broad range of funders

We will monitor achievements against these outputs, by ensuring the academics supported via this award are asked to provide regular updates on performance against these objectives.