LIFD Researchers awarded 'Zero Emission Mission' STFC funding

Six projects will look at cutting the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, from exploring how to make accelerators carbon neutral to using drones to monitor tree health.

Funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), announced today, will allow scientists to explore ways to turn research into real-world solutions and technologies to help to reach net zero.

Zero emission mission

In 2019 the UK government committed to reducing the UK’s net emissions of greenhouse gases to zero by 2050.

Researchers have been leading this drive towards net zero, for example:

• through driving innovation in renewable energy
• by creating new technologies to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

STFC’s early-stage net zero grant funding splits £800,000 for early development of promising technologies and solutions which support the UK’s goal to achieve net zero carbon dioxide emissions.

To win the funding, the technology had to come from an STFC lab or the project had to include expertise from STFC-funded research, to encourage scientists to find solutions in existing knowledge.

STFC Executive Chair Professor Mark Thomson said:

We all are responsible for finding ways to reduce our carbon emissions to achieve the government’s net zero target, especially in the research and innovation sector.

One of the ways we are doing that in STFC and across the scientific community is to look at how we conduct experiments and whether there might be more efficient ways of doing this.

We are also taking some of the cutting-edge techniques used for pioneering research and applying those to solve some of the biggest challenges to becoming a carbon neutral nation.

The project funded at Leeds will look at:

Combustion properties of ammonia

Similar to hydrogen, ammonia is a promising zero carbon alternative fuel for engine and gas turbine applications. This project will study the combustion properties of ammonia aerosols using numerical simulations and validation, using data from the Bradley Combustion Laboratory at the University of Leeds. The project is being led by Dr's Sven Van Loo and Junfeng Yang.

Full UKRI article: https://www.ukri.org/news/experts-in-innovation-and-research-launch-net-zero-schemes/