| HOME >> BIOLOGY >> TECHNOLOGY |
Professors Neal Skipper and Franco Cacialli, of the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) and the Department of Physics & Astronomy, University College London (UCL), have been awarded a 200,000 laboratory refurbishment grant to help them develop alternative fuel supplies for transport and electricity generation. The Royal Society awarded the grant, with funding from the Wolfson Foundation under a scheme aiming to improve the UKs research infrastructure.
The refurbishment programme will create a new facility to enable the team to address two important issues in carbon emission reduction: the creation of cheap, efficient storage for hydrogen, and the development of large-surface organic solar cells.
Professor Richard Catlow, Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physical Sciences at UCL commented This grant will greatly contribute to the search for alternative fuels and efficient renewable energy supplies, therefore building on UCL's strong programme of energy research. I am delighted to hear that the Royal Society and Wolfson Foundation are generously funding the laboratory refurbishment that will make this work possible.
One of the more challenging problems in energy research is to find a compact, safe and lightweight alternative to petroleum that has similar energy densities. There are a large number of different potential solutions to this problem, but the use of hydrogen has interesting possibilities in that it promises a clean, efficient form of energy storage.
However, for the hydrogen economy to be practical there are a several technological challenges to be overcome, many of which are associated with the materials used to store the hydrogen itself. The required performance targets for the storage material have been compiled by the US Department of Energy (DoE). These targets include the amount of hydrogen that can be stored, how easily the material can be filled and emptied, its cost, lifetime and safety. At t
'/>"/>
| Contact: Dave Weston d.weston@ucl.ac.uk 44-020-767-97678 University College London Source:Eurekalert |