Establishing a hydrogen fuelled transportation network is a research challenge that cuts across both the energy and transport sectors. It is a truly multi-disciplinary challenge which will require the advancement of many mutually dependent research disciplines. This Network will support the dissemination and impact of these activities between academia, industry, policymakers and the general public. Under the hydrogen fuelled transportation theme, the Network aims to bring together the knowledge obtained through research projects funded by the RCUK Programme and other national and international cross-disciplinary research aimed at developing a "hydrogen" for transport economy. It will have a strong multi-disciplinary focus and aim to ensure engagement and knowledge transfer takes place across all modes of transport and hydrogen energy including technology, socio-economics, behavioural science and policy. The Network team will manage a £500k feasibility fund for cutting edge projects which also meet the wider objectives of facilitating collaboration and multi-disciplinary research.

Over the next twenty years, the automotive and aerospace sector will undergo a fundamental revolution in propulsion technology. The automotive sector will rapidly move away from petrol and diesel engine powered cars towards fully electric propelled vehicles whilst planes will move away from pure kerosene powered jet engines to hybrid-electric propulsion. The automotive and aerospace industry has worked for the last two decades on developing electric propulsion research but development investment from industry and governments was low until recently, due to lag of legislation to significantly reduce greenhouse gases. Since the ratification of the 2016 Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius, governments of industrial developed nations have now legislated to ban new combustion powered vehicles (by 2040 in the UK and France, by 2030 in Germany and similar legislation is expected soon in China). The implementation of this ban will see a sharp rise of the global electric vehicle market to 7.5 million by 2020 with exponential growth. In the aerospace sector, Airbus, Siemens and Rolls-Royce have announced a 100-seater hybrid-electric aircraft to be launched by 2030 following successful tests of 2 seater electric powered planes. Other American and European aerospace industries such as Boeing and General Electric must also prepare for this fundamental shift in propulsion technology. Every electric car and every hybrid-electric plane needs an electric drive (propulsion) system, which typically comprises a motor and the electronics that controls the flow of energy to the motor. In order to make this a cost-effective reality, the cost of electric drives must be halved and their size and weight must be reduced by up to 500% compared to today's drive systems. These targets can only be achieved by radical integration of these two sub-systems that form an electric drive: the electric motor and the power electronics (capacitors, inductors and semiconductor switches). These are currently built as two independent systems and the fusion of both creates new interactions and physical phenomena between power electronics components and the electric motor. For example, all power electronics components would experience lots of mechanical vibrations and heat from the electric motor. Other challenges are in the assembly of connecting millimetre thin power electronics semiconductors onto a large hundred times bigger aluminium block that houses the electric motor for mechanical strength. To achieve this type of integration, industry recognises that future professional engineers need skills beyond the classical multi-disciplinary approach where individual experts work together in a team. Future propulsion engineers must adopt cross-disciplinary and creative thinking in order to understand the requirements of other disciplines. In addition, they will need an understanding of non-traditional engineering subjects such as business thinking, use of big data, environmental issues and ethical impact. Future propulsion engineers will need to experience a training environment that emphasises both deep subject knowledge and cross-disciplinary thinking. This EPSRC CDT in Power Electronics for Sustainable Electric Propulsion is formed by two of UK's largest and most forward thinking research groups in this field (at Newcastle and Nottingham Universities) and includes 16 leading industrial partners (Cummins, Dyson, CRRC, Protean, to name a few). All of them sharing one vision: To create a new generation of UK power electronics specialists, needed to meet the societal and industrial demand for clean, electric propulsion systems in future automotive and aerospace transport infrastructures.

Energy Storage (ES) has a key role to play as a part of whole UK and global energy systems, by providing flexibility, enhancing affordability, security and resilience against supply uncertainties, and addressing the huge challenges related to the climate change. Following UKRI investment over the last decade, the UK is in a strong position internationally in ES research and innovation. Although areas of UK expertise are world leading, there is little interaction between these areas and interplaying disciplines e.g. artificial intelligence, data and social sciences. This fragmentation limits the community's ability to deliver significant societal impact and threatens the continuity of delivering research excellence, missing opportunities as a result. Consequently, there is now an urgent need for the ES community to connect, convene and communicate more effectively. The proposed Supergen Storage Network Plus 2019 project (ES-Network+) responds to this need by bringing together 19 leading academics at different career stages across 12 UK institutions, with complementary energy storage (ES) related expertise and the necessary multidisciplinary balance to deliver the proposed programme. The aim of the ES-Network+ is to create a dynamic, forward-looking and sustainable platform, connecting and serving people from diverse backgrounds across the whole ES value chain including industry, academia and policymakers. As a focal point for the ES community, we will create, exchange and disseminate ES knowledge with our stakeholders. We will nurture early career researchers (ECR) in ES and establish ambitious, measurable goals for equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). We will complement existing activities (e.g. Faraday Institution, UKERC, Energy Systems Catapult, CREDS, other Supergen Hubs) to serve the UK's needs, delivering impact nationally and internationally. The ES-Network+ will convene and support the ES community to deliver societal impact through technological breakthroughs, generating further value from the UKRI ES portfolio. It will be a secure and inclusive eco-system for researchers in ES & related fields to access, innovate, build and grow their UK and international networks. It is distinctive from the current Supergen Storage Hub: We have a PI with non-electrochemical background, an expanded investigator team with complementary expertise in energy network integration, mechanical and inter-seasonal thermal ES, hybrid storage with digital knowledge, cold storage, transport with ES integration, ES materials measurement & imaging and social science with policy implications. Early career researchers will hold key positions within the ES-Network+ and we will underpin all of our work with EDI values. We will develop an authoritative whitepaper for steering ES related decision-making, giving an overview of the ES community and a technical view on how ES research should be steered going forward. The team is extremely well-connected to the ES industry and the wider energy community and has secured 57 supporting organisations, including energy production, transmission, distribution & network operation, specialist aggregators of heat & power, storage technology developers and integrators; ES related manufacturers, ES related recycling; and research institutes/centres/hubs/networks/associations both nationally and internationally. The supporting organisations also bring in a significant amount of extra resources to ensure a successful delivery of the ES-Network+.

The Circular Economy (CE) is a revolutionary alternative to a traditional linear, make-use-dispose economy. It is based on the central principle of maintaining continuous flows of resources at their highest value for the longest period and then recovering, cascading and regenerating products and materials at the end of each life cycle. Metals are ideal flows for a circular economy. With careful stewardship and good technology, metals mined from the Earth can be reused indefinitely. Technology metals (techmetals) are an essential, distinct, subset of specialist metals. Although they are used in much smaller quantities than industrial metals such as iron and aluminium, each techmetal has its own specific and special properties that give it essential functions in devices ranging from smart phones, batteries, wind turbines and solar cells to electric vehicles. Techmetals are thus essential enablers of a future circular, low carbon economy and demand for many is increasing rapidly. E.g., to meet the UK's 2050 ambition for offshore wind turbines will require 10 years' worth of global neodymium production. To replace all UK-based vehicles with electric vehicles would require 200% of cobalt and 75% of lithium currently produced globally each year. The UK is 100% reliant on imports of techmetals including from countries that represent geopolitical risks. Some techmetals are therefore called Critical Raw Materials (high economic importance and high risk of supply disruption). Only four of the 27 raw materials considered critical by the EU have an end-of-life recycling input rate higher than 10%. Our UKRI TechMet CE Centre brings together for the first time world-leading researchers to maximise opportunities around the provision of techmetals from primary and secondary sources, and lead materials stewardship, creating a National Techmetals Circular Economy Roadmap to accelerate us towards a circular economy. This will help the UK meet its Industrial Strategy Clean Growth agenda and its ambitious UK 2050 climate change targets with secure and environmentally-acceptable supplies of techmetals. There are many challenges to a future techmetal circular economy. With growing demand, new mining is needed and we must keep the environmental footprint of this primary production as low as possible. Materials stewardship of techmetals is difficult because their fate is often difficult to track. Most arrive in the UK 'hidden' in complex products from which they are difficult to recover. Collection is inefficient, consumers may not feel incentivised to recycle, and policy and legislative initiatives such as Extended Producer Responsibility focus on large volume metals rather than small quantity techmetals. There is a lack of end-to-end visibility and connection between different parts of techmetal value chains. The TechMet consortium brings together the Universities of Exeter, Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester and the British Geological Survey who are already working on how to improve the raw materials cycle, manufacture goods to be re-used and recycled, recycle complex goods such as batteries and use and re-use equipment for as long as possible before it needs recycling. One of our first tasks is to track the current flows of techmetals through the UK economy, which although fundamental, is poorly known. The Centre will conduct new interdisciplinary research on interventions to improve each stage in the cycle and join up the value chain - raw materials can be newly mined and recycled, and manufacturing technology can be linked directly to re-use and recycling. The environmental footprint of our techmetals will be evaluated. Business, regulatory and social experts will recommend how the UK can best put all these stages together to make a new techmetals circular economy and produce a strategy for its implementation.