The UK’s off-highway construction industry—diggers, bulldozers, and other heavy machinery—is investing £8m to figure out how to run its engines on hydrogen, methanol, and ethanol instead of diesel. This matters because full electrification won’t work for most of these machines. They are too large, operate in remote locations, or need too much power for batteries to be practical. The sector accounts for 80% of heavy-duty vehicle emissions in the UK, yet it has received far less attention than cars and lorries. Without new fuel systems and engine designs, this part of the economy cannot decarbonise. The centre, a partnership between Perkins (a Caterpillar subsidiary) and Loughborough University, will develop the fundamental engineering needed to burn alternative fuels efficiently and cleanly in heavy engines. It will also create design tools so that future products can be developed quickly and reliably. If successful, the work could keep the UK’s construction equipment industry—the largest in Europe and fifth globally—competitive while cutting its carbon emissions. It would also strengthen the domestic supply chain and train a generation of engineers who can design complex power systems for a post-diesel world.
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This Prosperity Partnership will create a Global Centre of Excellence, building on the successes of the well-established Innovation and Research Centre at Loughborough which is a collaboration between Perkins (as a Caterpillar UK subsidiary) and Loughborough University. The UK off-highway construction industry is 1st in Europe and 5th globally, and four times the size, in revenue terms, of the heavy-duty on-highway sector. Therefore, for the UK to meet its climate change targets as well as maintaining its excellent market share, it is imperative that it invests in solving the immense challenges of this sector that are significantly different from other sectors. Full electrification is not an option for many applications due to a range of complex scale, geographical, economic, and technical factors. Leveraging £2.57m of EPSRC investment, to deliver a total project value of £8m, this centre will develop disruptive technologies which will transform the design and engineering of complex heavy duty power systems to decarbonise this sector. The co-created vision and programme devised by Perkins and Loughborough University to undertake the foundational research required to decarbonise this hard to abate sector, 80% of which is off-highway, will investigate the use of alternative fuels including hydrogen and renewable fuels such as methanol and ethanol. The Perkins and Loughborough University partnership which is manifested in the Innovation and Research Centre at Loughborough, is ideally positioned to address these enormous challenges. With a track record of delivering excellent research through funding from bodies such as the Advanced Propulsion Centre, this team have a well-established collaborative working relationship and have extensive experience in co-creating impactful projects, combining the superior engineering capabilities and market knowledge of Perkins with the excellent academic capabilities of the Loughborough team. The outputs of the I&RC have been realised in many Perkins products which have been distributed worldwide, thus benefitting many downstream industries as well as the Perkins supply chain, much of which is in the UK. This Partnership will focus on improving the efficiency of a range of alternative fuels, reducing harmful emissions, enhancing materials durability and performance, and creating engineering design tools for the rapid, robust, optimal design of new products. To support this significant undertaking, Perkins is making substantial investment in hardware and Loughborough is investing over £1m in the centre’s infrastructure. The prosperity partnership funding will support early TRL projects complimenting the existing portfolio: to create a state-of-the-art facility delivering end-to-end research for this sector and facilitating impact beyond current capability. Additional benefits will be the consequential strengthening of the supply chain for manufacture of new products for alternative fuels, a nucleus of skilled engineers capable of designing and delivering complex power systems into the future, and a knowledge transfer of technology to the wider automotive industry. The expansion of the already successful I&RC into a centre of excellence for focused heavy-duty off-highway power systems will strengthen the UK’s reputation and capability in this sector, creating the foundations for a thriving manufacturing industry into the future.
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