The UK industrial strategy has identified fuel switching to electrical processes as a fundamental building block to maintain manufacturing in the UK and reduce emissions. Climate change legislation has set a deadline for the UK to be carbon neutral by 2050 and this will require the reinvention of a huge number of industrial manufacturing processes across a wide range of sectors. The shift to electricity as the energy vector allowing transition away from fossil fuels has many advantages reducing both emissions and increasing flexibility of supply providing stability for UK industry. Additionally in many applications using electrical energy can have other advantages such as reduced start-up time and increased production flexibility, which have been overlooked as energy costs drive production process design. The technical approach is based on the exploration of the theme of electric field effects on materials and processes. There are existing pieces of equipment at C-Tech Innovation Ltd that will form the basis of the work program and allow the development of novel experimental rigs to explore and characterise the effects observed over a number of studies. These include electric field assisted kiln technology, continuous flow microwave chemistry equipment, and atmospheric non equilibrium plasma. The effects of electric field on each of these areas have been observed and characterised both in the published literature and also in over 35 years of internal research reports undertaken at C-Tech Innovation and predecessor organisations in projects performed for a wide range of customers. It is expected that the development of a more complete understanding of the mechanisms and interactions will lead to an opportunity to create new applications for the use of electric fields in processes. The use of combined frequencies to generate specific effects or the interaction with pressure and temperature regimes will lead the company forward. The overall technical plan for the company will come out of this work setting in motion developments that will become core technologies after 2030 and lead to sustainable business model moving forwards. The technical elements will be aligned with a second stream of business focused development that will aid both the development of the fellow and the planning of the technical development work stream. The challenge for all businesses will be managing a transition to a low carbon industry in the decade 2030-2040 which will create disruptive influences in the type location and structure of industry . The integration of specific technology in to commercially planning require both strategic scenarios and detailed total cost of ownership modelling. The work will include reviews of industrial and economic trends in manufacturing which will be developed through cross sector interview and workshops. The aim will be to engage a cross section of stakeholders and move through a structured evidence gathering and sharing process to highlight the technical, policy and strategic issues to be addressed. C-Tech Innovation Ltd is an ISO 9001:2015 certified organisation and we have a detailed project management process suited to our area of bespoke special purpose machinery building and testing. We work with chemical, pharmaceutical, food, engineering, nuclear and other companies around the world. We have collaborated with hundreds of leading universities around the world and continue to do so on innovative projects.

The property of matter changes at the nanoscale, because atoms at the surface of a crystal have different properties from those buried within it. Nanocrystals have a large proportion of surface atoms so these revealed properties could be utilised, including enhanced catalytic/magnetic properties. However they are unstable during manufacture and are difficult to make because they want to agglomerate. When this happens their properties are lost. Agglomeration can be prevented by using molecular 'cradles'. This is difficult and expensive: the cradle must shield each nanoparticle from its neighbours, but allow some area to remain exposed. Bacterial surfaces provide good cradles. Metallic nanoparticles are made by bacterial enzyme action, and cradling by local biomolecules as they grow, individually, on bacterial surfaces. Examples are precious metals (PMs: Pd,Pt,Au) and iron (oxides). PMs are reduced by bacteria to the metallic state. Fe oxides exist in various mineral forms which are made and chosen via combinations of bacterial action, and chemical reactions in the bacterially-influenced 'reaction space'. The net results are supported catalysts & magnets with special properties attributable to their nanosize. Traditionally PMs make good chemical catalysts, and Fe-oxides make good magnets, but at the nanoscale these distinctions blur: palladium is ferromagnetic while Fe oxides have catalytic activity. Even better, hybrid PM/Fe nanoparticles are BETTER in both applications than single metals but nobody has attempted to bio-direct the synthesis of hybrid nanoparticles (called bimetallic or trimetallic clusters). The instability of nanoparticles makes this very difficult indeed using chemistry. Bacteria can make mixed metal nanoparticles from mixed solutions and they can even do this by scavenging the metals from liquid wastes. Indeed, some bacteria-bound trimetallics were found to have better catalytic properties than mono- nanocrystals. This may be due to the intruding metal forcing changes in the crystal structure so that 'buried' atoms are persuaded to think that they are more like surface ones. Similar changes could also be brought about by application of electromagnetic fields (EMF; dielectric processing) during and following crystal synthesis but this has not been tried before. A combination of stable nanoparticles on bacteria plus dielectric processing could make a new generation of supernanoparticles, far in advance of what we already have. We aim to define the potential for making completely new materials using a portfolio of our bacteria as the catalysts for nanoparticle synthesis, and support. Some bacteria reduce PMs, some make ferric oxides, some do both. We will biomanufacture nanoscale chemical catalysts (PMs), nanomagnets (Fe), swop to get PM-magnets and Fe-catalysts and then combine them to make novel PM/Fe hybrids. We will relate what we make to how we make it, i.e the bacterial activity/surface properties and the crystals made. The industrial Partner will dielectric-process the bionanoparticles to further enhance their properties and a collaboration with Cardiff will use electron microscopy to be able to see what we have made, down to the atomic level. We will do example catalytic and magnetic testing of the bionanomaterials in the Universities against commercial standard materials. Mainly we will use pure metal solutions and bacterial strains for fundamental study. Finally, with the best bacteria, we will briefly look at example novel bionanomaterials made from mining wastes (Fe) and industrial wastes (Pd/Au) since we know these can work even better. We will use multifunctional bacteria and also some enhanced by mutations as appropriate

Ammonia is one of the most important chemicals used in modern society and the production of ammonia is estimated to be doubled by 2050 due to the population increase and growth of the economy. Ammonia is also a promising zero-carbon energy vector for long-term renewable energy storage and a green fuel through direct combustion. Today, ammonia is mainly produced from N2 and H2 on a large scale through the centralised Haber-Bosch (H-B) process, which is typically carried out at high temperatures (450 - 600 oC) and high pressures (150 - 300 bar). However, this well-developed and energy-intensive process consumes 1 - 2% of the world's primary energy supply and emits over 300 million metric tons of CO2 each year. Therefore, developing new revolutionised technologies for decentralised 'green ammonia production' using renewables is urgently needed due to the constantly increasing demand for ammonia in both agricultural and green fuel applications. This proposal aims to develop a breakthrough approach using innovative functional porous particulates and an emerging plasma technology for decentralised ammonia production using local excessive renewable electricity, which is otherwise curtailed from generation due to low demand and/or transmission constraints. In this project, we will demonstrate the synthesis of highly porous lithium foam particulates to intensify the nitrogen fixation reaction and the non-thermal plasma-assisted flexible lithium hydroxide decomposition reaction.

Precious metal catalysts are key to many processes in chemical industry (e.g. hydrogenations, oxidations, syntheses), environment (automotive catalysts, fuel cells) and medicine (metallic nanoparticles). In general different catalysts are used for different processes. Recently the potential benefits of being able to use bimetallic catalysts have been appreciated but these types of catalyst are difficult to make by conventional methods, and may give products of inconsistent quality.As part of an ongoing EPSRC project we evaluated the potential for using bacteria to biomanufacture precious metal catalysts, while a sister BBSRC project is, in parallel, evaluating the potential for sourcing precious metals from wastes: together these projects have demonstrated a 'one stop shop' microbial method to biomanufacturing new, active, catalysts from wastes. The ongoing EPSRC project has shown a new method to make a bimetallic catalyst based on Au and Pd. Bimetallic catalysts are 'next generation': they can achieve high selectivities and reactions that single metal catalysts cannot. Pd/Au bimetallic catalysts are not yet commercially available although the catalyst industry is working hard to achieve this goal. Within a short, internally-funded development study we showed high selectivity by biomanufactured Pd/Au bimetallic in a typical alcohol oxidation; the selectivity was accompanied by a high activity, neither of which were achieved by commercial single metal comparators. This, and the high scalability of biomanufacturing systems, prompted this FoF bid, the purpose of which is to facilitate and enable the transition from benchtop demonstration to commercial prototype. For the latter we will utilise two novel catalyst formulation methods brought by collaborations, namely (a) metallic nanoparticles supported on carbon spheres and (b) a novel immobilisation method yielding highly cohesive bacteria which hold the precoius metal nanoparticles/bimetallics tightly.We will manufacture test quantities of both new materials and evaluate their potential in oxidation reactions of known commercial relevance. We will also test the potential for the new 'Bio-Pd/Au' as a fuel cell (FC) catalyst via extant collaboration with a FC expert. . Using (a) suspended metallised bacterial cells and (b) bionanocatalyst made by the two new attachment methods we will evaluate not only total catalyst activity but catalyst re-usability in repeated reaction cycles, with particular emphasis on durability and lack of attrition, ensuring nanocatalyst retention and complete separation from the product stream without fragmentation. In parallel with the technical tasks business development will proceed with the assistance ot two associated Fellowships dedicated to business development, a company Partner who wishes to initiate a new joint venture, and a current Partner who will take the lead in organising dissemination activity to the market audience via a dissemination workshop. With IP filing imminent, there wil be no barrier to dissemination; indeed, a manuscript is awaiting submission to 'Science' in the immediate future, with several additional high profile disseminations anticipated. These we propose to achieve within the project's lifetime

The InterCityAir project will develop a wireless sensor for the measurement of air pollution. The sensor will be integrated into urban traffic management systems in the City of Chester to reduce levels of toxic gases to which the public are being exposed. InterCityAir will directly address the following key challenges of this call, namely: The use of environmental and social data to address urban challenges, the creation of a new value proposition through integration of datasets, and an improvement in the monitoring of the urban environment through the development and deployment of an intelligent sensor system. InterCityAir will develop an air quality (AQ) sensing platform that can be integrated with the transport management systems of Cheshire West and Chester Council (CWAC). C-Tech will develop a wireless sensing unit comprising commercial sensors that could be deployed as a stand-alone system or city-wide network at low cost for remote real-time monitoring of air quality. The sensing units will be wireless enabled and suitable for road-side AQ monitoring with a view to be adapted for on-board vehicle monitoring of AQ. This project will establish the feasibility of linking the C-Tech sensing unit with existing traffic count data and the traffic signalling system to alleviate traffic build-up and associated pollution hotspots. The University of Chester (UOC) will deploy air quality instrumentation alongside the CWAC real-time nitrogen oxides (NOx) monitoring site in the Air Quality Management Area (AQMA) on the Boughton gyratory to gather comprehensive baseline data to understand fully the performance of the sensor package in the complex urban atmosphere. This site in the AQMA will be used as a demonstration site for the sensing platform developed by C-Tech.