Sustainable Energy

Reaching net-zero requires a rapid global transition away from fossil fuels and towards sustainable, low-carbon and low-cost energy production and storage systems. To completely decarbonise all sectors in society we need multiple types of sustainable energy, including low-carbon electricity and heating, sustainable fuels and sustainable chemicals. 

Researchers within the Centre for Sustainable Engineering are working on development of novel engineering solutions for large scale sustainable power generation. This includes:

  • Sustainable battery development for large-scale grid electricity storage, including redox-flow batteries prepared from biomass waste, new anode materials for Na-ion batteries and advanced capacitors.
  • Next-generation photovoltaic devices based on earth-abundant materials such as perovskite, organic and metal-oxide semiconductors, for low-cost and multi-functional electricity generation.
  • Sustainable fuels production (for example hydrogen, ammonia and biofuels) using catalytic, photoelectrochemical and pyrolytic approaches.
  • Developing numerical models to predict behaviour in nuclear reactors.
In addition, staff within the Centre are working on ambient energy harvesting systems that can simultaneously or separately harvest mechanical, thermal or solar energy using piezoelectric nanostructures, thermoelectrics and light absorber materials respectively.
Textile-based piezoelectric energy harvester using ZnO nanorods grown on e-textile enabling wearable kinetic energy harvestingTextile-based piezoelectric energy harvester using ZnO nanorods grown on e-textile enabling wearable kinetic energy harvesting
Photoelectrochemical-photovoltaic coupled solar hydrogen production
Photoelectrochemical-photovoltaic coupled solar hydrogen production