Loughborough University - Equipment Account

This proposal requests capital infrastructure to create ThemExS Lab, a future centre of excellence for research on exergy storage involving high-grade heat. The proposal builds on the growing international consensus that heat capture, conversion and storage will become increasingly important in the move to a
low carbon energy system and our analysis that it is likely to play a pivotal role in providing cost effective energy storage options both at the very large centralized and small distributed grid-scales.

This revised version of the bid still covers the three categories in the original proposal, however to meet the reduction in funding to £1.7 million a significant reduction in the scale of the transition scale test platforms has been made. In addition, further discount arrangements are being negotiated with a number of
suppliers, which has enabled greater value from the investment)

The division of funds between categories is now
(A) Materials characterisation equipment for high grade heat storage materials (£0.536M)
(B) Bench scale test platforms for examining heat transfer, fluid flow and storage density (£0.297M)
(C) Transition scale test platforms giving insight into full scale system behaviours (£0.866M).

Recognising that the total portfolio of energy storage equipment infrastructure will necessarily be much broader than the tightly-focused equipment set requested here, the present consortium has not bid for a national energy storage centre. However, it both expects that such a centre will be established and that the facilities described here will form a key resource for that centre. As outlined in the overview, the equipment falls into three categories with the bulk of spend being on transition-scale platforms. To provide for maximum versatility, these platforms will be: (a) containerised where feasible, (b) fitted with standard-size interfaces and (c) fully described in documents made accessible to the national energy storage centre and published on dedicated consortium website. The proposed suite of equipment and demonstration facilities will be used to support the existing RCUK investments i-STUTE and IMAGES. In addition the PI and CO-I's will actively seek funding from sources including industry, DECC, RCUK, TSB and the Europe Union to support further research projects that will utilise these facilities. We currently have a number of existing PhD who will benefit from access to the new facilities, these facilities when established will allow research student numbers active in this important area to be increased. The cohort of 40 Students studying the Renewable Energy Systems Technology MSc at Loughborough will be encouraged to undertake projects utilising the new resources.