The UK’s national synchrotron facility will be turned into a high-speed materials testing lab for the energy transition. Shell, Imperial College London, and Diamond Light Source are building new instruments to watch how material surfaces behave under real-world conditions—high temperature, pressure, electric fields, and constant flow—while they are actually operating. The problem is that many promising clean energy technologies fail because their surfaces degrade over time. Carbon capture systems lose efficiency. Electric vehicle batteries fade. Catalysts wear out. Engineers currently cannot see these changes happening in real time, so they design around guesswork. This project will let them watch interfaces break down, corrode, or transform as they work, and link those observations across scales from atoms to entire devices. If it succeeds, the research will create a mechanistic platform for designing materials with longer lifetimes and lower energy demands. That could accelerate deployment of carbon capture, better batteries, and more efficient catalysts. The work is fundamental science—it builds the understanding needed before any specific product emerges—but past investments in synchrotron capabilities have directly enabled advances in everything from drug design to aircraft alloys.
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Climate Change is the single biggest threat to present and future generations: to meet the ambitious targets for net zero CO2 set out by the UK government and in line with Paris Climate Agreement requires technological mobilization on an unprecedented scale - with action required in rapid development and deployment of new approaches. A paradigm shift in the UK's research and development capabilities is needed to reduce time to market for novel and sustainable solutions for energy production and consumption. Successful rapid translation requires partnership between academia and industry, with a shared vision and commitment. Proposed technological strategies for CO2 reduction - either at source (you don't produce it) or post combustion mitigation (you capture and use it) - have limitations in efficiency, stability or lifetime associated with the behaviour of material interfaces in the systems, and how these interfaces change with time in the operating environments. Examples of such dynamic systems range from geological carbon capture and storage, to interfaces in new electric vehicles, to nanoscale materials for catalysts or energy harvesting. If we were able to understand and control such interfaces it would provide a transformation in our ability to create, optimize and deploy radical technological solutions to both combat climate change and create clean energy systems. In this joint programme between Shell, Imperial College London and the UK National Synchrotron Facility - Diamond Light Source - we aim to develop entirely new capabilities to study the behaviour of interfaces under complex real world conditions - such as high temperature, flow, stress, electric fields etc. and to be able to correlate the measurements in time and across length-scales so that we build up a complete picture of interface properties and how they change. We will combine these experiments with state-of-the-art computational techniques to provide new insights into interfacial behaviour. This mechanistic platform represents the foundation that will underpin the rational design of new materials and processes with reduced energy demand, better lifetime or more robust integrity.
Chris Nicklin (Co-Investigator)Daniele Dini (Co-Investigator)Finn Giuliani (Co-Investigator)Janet Wong (Co-Investigator)Mary Ryan (Principal Investigator)Paul Quinn (Co-Investigator)Ronny Pini (Co-Investigator)Samuel Krevor (Co-Investigator)Sofia Diaz-Moreno (Co-Investigator)
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