̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Manish Chhowalla

What does it take to make a better battery?

lw355 — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 08:20:28 +0000

Cambridge researchers are working to solve one of technology’s biggest puzzles: how to build next-generation batteries that could power a green revolution.

Three Cambridge researchers awarded Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies

sc604 — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 11:06:52 +0000

From atomically thin semiconductors for more energy-efficient electronics, to harnessing the power of the sun by upcycling biomass and plastic waste into sustainable chemicals, their research encompasses a variety of technological advances with the potential to deliver wide-ranging benefits.

Funded by the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Academy’s Chair in Emerging Technologies scheme aims to identify global research visionaries and provide them with long-term support. Each £2,500,000 award covers employment and research costs, enabling each researcher to focus on advancing their technology to application in a strategic manner for up to 10 years.

Since 2017, the Chair in Emerging Technologies programme has awarded over £100 million to Chairs in 16 universities located across the UK. Of the four Chairs awarded in this round, three were awarded to Cambridge researchers.

Professor Manish Chhowalla FREng, from the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, is developing ultra-low-power electronics based on wafer-scale manufacture of atomically thin (or 2D) semiconductors. ̽��ֱ��atomically thin nature of the 2D semiconductors makes them ideal for energy-efficient electronics. To reap their benefits, complementary metal oxide semiconductor processes will be developed for integration into ultra-low power devices.

Professor Nic Lane and his team at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, are working to make the development of AI more democratic by focusing on AI methods that are less centralised and more collaborative, and offer better privacy protection.

Their project, nicknamed DANTE, aims to encourage wider and more active participation across society in the development and adoption of AI techniques.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving towards a situation where only a handful of the largest companies in the world can participate,” said Lane. “Given the importance of this technology to society this trajectory must be changed. We aim to invent, popularise and commercialise core new scientific breakthroughs that will enable AI technology in the future to be far more collaborative, distributed and open than it is today.”

̽��ֱ��project will focus on developing decentralised forms of AI that facilitate the collaborative study, invention, development and deployment of machine learning products and methods, primarily between collections of companies and organisations. An underlying mission of DANTE is to facilitate advanced AI technology remaining available for adoption in the public sphere, for example in hospitals, public policy, and energy and transit infrastructure.

Professor Erwin Reisner, from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, is developing a technology, called solar reforming, that creates sustainable fuels and chemicals from biomass and plastic waste. This solar-powered technology uses only waste, water and air as ingredients, and the sun powers a catalyst to produce green hydrogen fuel and platform chemicals to decarbonise the transport and chemical sectors. A recent review in Nature Reviews Chemistry gives an overview of plans for the technology.

“ ̽��ֱ��generous long-term support provided by the Royal Academy of Engineering will be the critical driver for our ambitions to engineer, scale and ultimately commercialise our solar chemical technology,” said Reisner. “ ̽��ֱ��timing for this support is perfect, as my team has recently demonstrated several prototypes for upcycling biomass and plastic waste using sunlight, and we have excellent momentum to grasp the opportunities arising from developing these new technologies. I also hope to use this Chair to leverage further support to establish a circular chemistry centre in Cambridge to tackle our biggest sustainability challenges.”

“I am excited to announce this latest round of Chairs in Emerging Technology,” said Dr Andrew Clark, Executive Director, Programmes, at the Royal Academy of Engineering. “ ̽��ֱ��mid-term reviews of the previous rounds of Chairs are providing encouraging evidence that long-term funding of this nature helps to bring the groundbreaking and influential ideas of visionary engineers to fruition. I look forward to seeing the impacts of these four exceptionally talented individuals.”

Three Cambridge researchers – Professors Manish Chhowalla, Nic Lane and Erwin Reisner – have each been awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies, to develop emerging technologies with high potential to deliver economic and social benefits to the UK.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

L-R: Manish Chhowalla, Nic Lane, Erwin Reisner

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Cambridge researchers awarded ERC funding to support commercial potential of their work

sc604 — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 16:05:46 +0000

Professor Cecilia Mascolo from the Department of Computer Science and Technology will use the funding to further her work on developing mobile devices – like commercially-available earbuds – that can accurately pick up wearers’ body sounds and monitor them for health purposes.

̽��ֱ��ERC Proof of Concept grants – worth €150,000 – help researchers bridge the gap between the discoveries stemming from their frontier research and the practical application of the findings, including the early phases of their commercialisation.

Researchers use this type of funding to verify the practical viability of scientific concepts, explore business opportunities or prepare patent applications.

Mascolo’s existing ERC-funded Project EAR was the first to demonstrate that the existing microphones in earbuds can be used to pick up wearers’ levels of activity and heart rate and to trace it accurately even when the wearer is exercising vigorously.

She now wants to build on this work by enhancing the robustness of these in-ear microphones and further improve their performance in monitoring human activity and physiology in 'real life' conditions, including by developing new algorithms to help the devices analyse the data they are collecting.

“There are currently no solutions on the market that use audio devices to detect body function signals like this and they could play an extremely valuable role in health monitoring,” said Mascolo. “Because the devices’ hardware, computing needs and energy consumption are inexpensive, they could put body function monitoring into the hands of the world's population accurately and affordably.”

Professor Manish Chhowalla from the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy was awarded a Proof of Concept Grant to demonstrate large-scale and high-performance lithium-sulfur batteries.

“Our breakthrough in lithium-sulphur batteries demonstrates a future beyond lithium-ion batteries; moving away from the reliance on critical raw materials and enabling the electrification of fundamentally new applications such as aviation,” said Dr Ismail Sami, Research Fellow in Chhowalla’s group. “This Proof of Concept will help us take the essential commercial and technical steps in bringing our innovation to market.”

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers have been awarded Proof of Concept grants from the European Research Council (ERC), to help them explore the commercial or societal potential of their research. ̽��ֱ��funding is part of the EU's research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Left: Cecilia Mascolo, Right: Ismail Sami

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Scientists develop fully woven, smart display

sc604 — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 13:17:14 +0000

An international team of scientists have produced a fully woven smart textile display that integrates active electronic, sensing, energy and photonic functions. ̽��ֱ��functions are embedded directly into the fibres and yarns, which are manufactured using textile-based industrial processes.

̽��ֱ��researchers, led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, say their approach could lead to applications that sound like sci-fi: curtains that are also TVs, energy-harvesting carpets, and interactive, self-powered clothing and fabrics.

This is the first time that a scalable large-area complex system has been integrated into textiles using an entirely fibre-based manufacturing approach. Their results are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

Despite recent progress in the development of smart textiles, their functionality, dimensions and shapes are limited by current manufacturing processes.

Integrating specialised fibres into textiles through conventional weaving or knitting processes means they could be incorporated into everyday objects, which opens up a huge range of potential applications. However, to date, the manufacturing of these fibres has been size limited, or the technology has not been compatible with textiles and the weaving process.

To make the technology compatible with weaving, the researchers coated each fibre component with materials that can withstand enough stretching so they can be used on textile manufacturing equipment. ̽��ֱ��team also braided some of the fibre-based components to improve their reliability and durability. Finally, they connected multiple fibre components together using conductive adhesives and laser welding techniques.

Using these techniques together, they were able to incorporate multiple functionalities into a large piece of woven fabric with standard, scalable textile manufacturing processes.

̽��ֱ��resulting fabric can operate as a display, monitor various inputs, or store energy for later use. ̽��ֱ��fabric can detect radiofrequency signals, touch, light and temperature. It can also be rolled up, and because it’s made using commercial textile manufacturing techniques, large rolls of functional fabric could be made this way.

̽��ֱ��researchers say their prototype display paves the way to next-generation e-textile applications in sectors such as smart and energy-efficient buildings that can generate and store their own energy, Internet of Things (IoT), distributed sensor networks and interactive displays that are flexible and wearable when integrated with fabrics.

“Our approach is built on the convergence of micro and nanotechnology, advanced displays, sensors, energy and technical textile manufacturing,” said Professor Jong min Kim, from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who co-led the research with Dr Luigi Occhipinti and Professor Manish Chhowalla. “This is a step towards the full exploitation of sustainable, convenient e-fibres and e-textiles in daily applications. And it’s only the beginning.”

“By integrating fibre-based electronics, photonic, sensing and energy functionalities, we can achieve a whole new class of smart devices and systems,” said Occhipinti, also from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “By unleashing the full potential of textile manufacturing, we could soon see smart and energy-autonomous Internet of Things devices that are seamlessly integrated into everyday objects and many other sector applications.”

̽��ֱ��researchers are working with European collaborators to make the technology sustainable and useable for everyday objects. They are also working to integrate sustainable materials as fibre components, providing a new class of energy textile systems. Their flexible and functional smart fabric could eventually be made into batteries, supercapacitors, solar panels and other devices.

̽��ֱ��research was funded in part by the European Commission and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Reference:
HW Choi et al. ‘Smart textile lighting/display system with multifunctional fibre devices for large scale smart home and IoT applications.’ Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28459-6

Researchers have developed a 46-inch (116cm) woven display with smart sensors, energy harvesting and storage integrated directly into the fabric.

By integrating fibre-based electronics, photonic, sensing and energy functionalities, we can achieve a whole new class of smart devices and systems

Luigi Occhipinti

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Twelve Cambridge researchers awarded European Research Council funding

sc604 — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Two hundred and nine senior scientists from across Europe were awarded grants in today’s announcement, representing a total of €507 million in research funding. ̽��ֱ��UK has 51 grantees in this year’s funding round, the most of any ERC participating country.

ERC grants are awarded through open competition to projects headed by starting and established researchers, irrespective of their origins, who are working or moving to work in Europe. ̽��ֱ��sole criterion for selection is scientific excellence. ERC Advanced Grants are designed to support excellent scientists in any field with a recognised track record of research achievements in the last ten years. Apart from strengthening Europe’s knowledge base, the new research projects will also lead to the creation of some 1,900 new jobs for post-doctoral fellows, PhD students and other research staff.

Professor Melinda Duer from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry has been awarded a grant for her EXTREME project to explore the chemistry that happens when a biological tissue stretches or breaks.

So-called mechanochemistry leads to molecules being generated within the tissue that may be involved in communicating tissue damage to cells. Detecting and understanding this chemistry is highly relevant for understanding ageing, and for developing new therapeutics for degenerative diseases and cancer.

“This award means I can do the research I’ve been dreaming about for the last ten years,” said Duer. “I am extremely grateful to the European Research Council for giving me this amazing opportunity. ̽��ֱ��ERC is one of the few organisations that understands the need for longer-term funding for high-risk, high-reward research, which is essential for this project. I really couldn’t be more delighted and I can’t wait to get started!”

Professor Manish Chhowalla, from the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, received funding for his 2D-LOTTO project, for the development of energy-efficient electronics.

“This grant will enable our research group to realise the next generation of energy-efficient electronics based on two-dimensional semiconductors,” he said. “ ̽��ֱ��funding will also support a team of students, early career researchers and senior academics to address the challenges of demonstrating practical tunnel field effect transistors.”

Professor Henning Sirringhaus from the Cavendish Laboratory received funding for his NANO-DECTET project, for the development of next-generation energy materials. “Worldwide, only about a third of primary energy is converted into useful energy services: the other two thirds are wasted as heat in the various industrial, transportation, residential energy conversion and electricity generation processes,” said Sirringhaus. “Given the urgent need to mitigate the dangerous consequences of climate change, a waste of energy on this scale needs to be addressed immediately.

“Thermoelectric waste-heat-to-electricity conversion could offer a potential solution, but the performance of thermoelectric materials is currently insufficient. In this project we will use the unique physics of molecular organic semiconductors, as well as hybrid organic-inorganic semiconductors, to make efficient, low-temperature thermoelectric materials.”

Professor Marcos Martinon-Torres from the Department of Archaeology received funding for his REVERSEACTION project, which will study how societies in the past cooperated. “Many prehistoric societies did pretty well at maintaining rich and complex lives without the need for permanent power hierarchies and coercive authorities,” he said. “Arguably, they chose to cooperate, and not just to ensure survival. ̽��ֱ��lack of state structures did not stop them from developing and sustaining complex technologies, making extraordinary artefacts that required exotic materials, challenging skills and labour arrangements. I’m keen to understand why, but also how they managed.

“This grant couldn’t have come at a better time, as collective action is increasingly recognised as the only way to tackle some of our greatest global concerns, and there is value in studying how people collaborated in the past. With our labs freshly revamped through our recent AHRC infrastructure grant, we are ready to take on a new large-scale, challenging archaeological science project.”

Professor Marta Mirazon Lahr, also from the Department of Archaeology, was awarded funding for her NGIPALAJEM project, which will bring a new understanding of how the evolution of our species is part of a broader and longer African evolutionary landscape.

“My research is in human evolution, a field that advances through technical breakthroughs, new ideas, and critically, new fossils,” said Lahr. “A big part of my work is to find new hominin fossils in Africa, which requires not only supportive local communities and institutions, but long-term planning and implementation, a dedicated team, significant funds and the time to excavate, study, compare and interpret new discoveries. This new grant from the ERC gives me all this and more – and I just can’t wait to get started!”

Professor Richard Samworth’s RobustStats project will develop robust statistical methodology and theory for large-scale data. “Large-scale data are usually messy: they may be collected under different conditions, and data may be missing or corrupted, which makes it difficult to draw reliable conclusions,” said Samworth, from the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. “This grant will allow me to focus my time on developing robust statistical methodology and theory to address these challenges. Equally importantly, I will be able to build a group of PhD students and post-docs that will dramatically increase the scale and scope of what we are able to achieve.

Professor Zoran Hadzibabic from the Cavendish Laboratory was awarded funding for his UNIFLAT project. One of the great successes of the last-century physics was recognising that complex and seemingly disparate systems are fundamentally alike. This allowed the classification of the equilibrium states of matter into classes based on their basic properties. At the heart of this classification is the universal collective behaviour, insensitive to the microscopic details, displayed by systems close to phase transitions.

A grand challenge for modern physics is to achieve such a feat for the far richer world of the nonequilibrium collective phenomena. “Our ambition is to make a leading contribution to this worldwide effort, through a series of coordinated experiments on homogeneous atomic gases in two-dimensional (2D) geometry,” said Hadzibabic. “Specifically, we will study in parallel three problems – the dynamics of the topological Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition, turbulence in driven systems, and the universal spatiotemporal scaling behaviour in isolated quantum systems far from equilibrium. Each of these topics is fascinating and of fundamental importance in its own right, but beyond that we will experimentally establish an emerging picture that connects them.”

Dr Helen Williams from the Department of Earth Sciences said: “By funding the EarthMelt project, the ERC has given me the amazing opportunity to study the early evolution of the Earth and its transition from a largely molten state to the habitable planet we know today. This funding will also help me to develop exciting new instrumentation and analytical techniques, and, most importantly, mentor and support the next generation of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers working in geochemistry.”

Professor Sir Richard Friend from the Cavendish Laboratory has been awarded funding for his Spin Control in Radical Semiconductors (SCORS) project, which will explore the electronic properties of organic semiconductors that have an unpaired electron to give net magnetic spin. ̽��ֱ��project is based on a recent discovery that this unpaired electron can couple strongly to light, allowing very efficient luminescence in LEDs. Friend’s group will explore new combinations of optical excited states with magnetic spin states. This will allow new designs for LEDs and solar cells, and opportunities to control the ground state spin polarisation in spintronic devices.

Professor Christopher Hunter’s InfoMols project is focused on synthetic information molecules. “ ̽��ֱ��aim of our project is replication and evolution with artificial polymers,” said Hunter, from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. “ ̽��ֱ��timeframe for achieving such a breakthrough is unpredictable, and it is the flexibility provided by an ERC award that makes tackling such challenging targets possible.”

Professor Mark Gross from the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics received funding for his Mirror symmetry in Algebraic Geometry (MSAG) project, and Professor Geoffrey Khan from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies was awarded funding for ALHOME: Echoes of Vanishing Voices in the Mountains: A Linguistic History of Minorities in the Near East.

Twelve ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers have won advanced grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premier research funding body. Their work is set to provide new insights into many subjects, such as how to deal with vast scales of data in a statistically robust way, the development of energy-efficient materials for a zero-carbon world, and the development of new treatments for degenerative disease and cancer. Cambridge has the most grant winners of any UK institution, and the second-most winners overall.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Top, left to right: Helen Williams, Richard Friend, Richard Samworth, Melinda Duer. Bottom, left to right: Chris Hunter, Marta Mirazon Lahr, Marcos Martinon-Torres, Manish Chhowalla

Yes

Cambridge Zero

sc604 — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 09:29:39 +0000

If we are to avert a climate disaster, we must sharply reduce our emissions, starting today. Cambridge Zero, the ̽��ֱ��'s ambitious new climate initiative, will generate ideas and innovations to help shape a sustainable future - and equip future generations of leaders with the skills to navigate the global challenges of the coming decades.