Championing business sustainability at Exeter
The University of Exeter's Green Future Solutions initiative is helping businesses reach their sustainability goals
World-leading R&D facilities in Nottingham delivering net zero transport
20 January 2025
In 2024, the University of Nottingham secured more than £70 million to establish new world-leading and open-access research facilities and programmes that will decarbonise future transport, driving economic growth through partnerships with industry and helping the UK deliver on net zero targets
The funding is secured based on a £14 million award from the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund (UKRPIF). This was augmented by both public and private co-investment that will allow the university to build on its existing internationally leading capabilities in electrification, hydrogen and manufacturing.
The facilities will enable scale up of a number of manufacturing processes for Electrical Machines and Drives being developed in UKRI’s Driving the Electric Revolution Industrialisation Centre (DER-IC).
From March 2025, the university will work closely with industry partners to demonstrate electrical machines and drives manufacturing for a range of propulsion, traction, and generator applications. The manufacturing facilities will also be available for industry co-location to accelerate new technology developments to market.
The facilities and programmes will also enable testing of novel powertrains, including cryogenic electrical machines and power electronics, systems fuelled by liquid hydrogen and other green fuels, as well as the opportunity to create advanced manufacturing capabilities to allow rapid market introduction of the latest research into decarbonised transport solutions where battery electric power is not viable.
Industry and researchers will be able to ‘plug and play’ disruptive heavy transport components and sub-systems. A new systems integration lab, operational by 2025, will support discovery of insights through performance evaluations under real-world environments with real component and sub-system interactions.
