The Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) will undertake a wide variety of work in the Manufacturing, Construction and product design areas. The work will be contained within 5 programmes:1. Transforming Organisations / Providing individuals, organisations, sectors and regions with the dynamic and innovative capability to thrive in a complex and uncertain future2. High Value Assets / Delivering tools, techniques and designs to maximise the through-life value of high capital cost, long life physical assets3. Healthy & Secure Future / Meeting the growing need for products & environments that promote health, safety and security4. Next Generation Technologies / The future materials, processes, production and information systems to deliver products to the customer5. Customised Products / The design and optimisation techniques to deliver customer specific products.Academics within the Loughborough IMCRC have an internationally leading track record in these areas and a history of strong collaborations to gear IMCRC capabilities with the complementary strengths of external groups.Innovative activities are increasingly distributed across the value chain. The impressive scope of the IMCRC helps us mirror this industrial reality, and enhances knowledge transfer. This advantage of the size and diversity of activities within the IMCRC compared with other smaller UK centres gives the Loughborough IMCRC a leading role in this technology and value chain integration area. Loughborough IMCRC as by far the biggest IMRC (in terms of number of academics, researchers and in funding) can take a more holistic approach and has the skills to generate, identify and integrate expertise from elsewhere as required. Therefore, a large proportion of the Centre funding (approximately 50%) will be allocated to Integration projects or Grand Challenges that cover a spectrum of expertise.The Centre covers a wide range of activities from Concept to Creation.The activities of the Centre will take place in collaboration with the world's best researchers in the UK and abroad. The academics within the Centre will be organised into 3 Research Units so that they can be co-ordinated effectively and can cooperate on Programmes.

The project will deploy and demonstrate local storage technologies which have reached TRL 5-6 in a real electrical grid, and will develop ICT tools to exploit the synergies between them, the smart grid and the citizens. The demonstration in this real environment will be driven by five use cases covering low voltage and medium voltage scenarios and a wide range of applications and functionalities. Viable business models will be defined for the cases, and proposal for changes in regulations will be made. Dissemination and exploitation activities will ensure these results drive market uptake of storage technologies. The expected outcomes of the project are: - An energy management system to be used by the energy companies to manage the energy of their associates´ storage devices. - Control systems to integrate management and decision support tools that enable the integration of renewable generation, forecasting and storage systems into the smart-grid. - Innovative storage solutions: • HESS (Hybrid Energy Storage System – Ultracapacitors + Li-ion batteries) • Second Life Electric Vehicle Batteries • Home Hybrid technologies (Ultracapacitors + Li-ion batteries) - Business models to allow easier deployment of energy storage technologies into the electricity market - Proposed changes to regulators in the social and economic areas in order to lower barriers to the deployment of distributed storage for the defined use cases. - Life Cycle Assessment / Life Cycle Cost of the storage systems used in the project The project will achieve topic expected impacts and also environmental and socioeconomic impacts, like carbon emissions reduction and lowering the EU dependency of fossil fuels. The project gives Energy Services Companies (ESCO) a main role in the deployment and exploitation of storage solutions. The consortium foresees the creation of an ESCO to exploit demonstrated business models after the project. The consortium is designed to meet the requirements of this innovation action, with strong industrial members, innovative SMEs, research organizations, experts, DSO and a follower smart-city. This consortium is capable of bringing innovative technologies to socioeconomically viable solutions.