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Energy and Sustainability

The move to a sustainable energy future will encompass all aspects of the transport system and city networks. Research strengths which can contribute to growth in this area include:

• Technologies to underpin the digital transport infrastructure
• Modelling and managing building energy usage
• Improving air quality through reducing vehicle emissions
• Lifecycle analysis with its associated environmental impact
• The development of models for land use and transport
• Optimisation of urban transit routing
• Additive manufacturing
• A more sustainable approach to managing waste (the circular economy)

An overarching requirement is to ensure that this transition occurs with a responsible approach to research and innovation, and understanding the social responsibilities of the large corporations involved in this area.

All transport systems will be challenged by the move to electrification. The supporting electricity distribution system, must be both resilient and sustainable, and minimise impacts on the environment. We undertake fundamental research into energy technologies – new sources, harvesting, and storage - together with power conversion technologies which are more efficient and have higher power density.

We also work on system support structures such as vehicle-to-grid, off-grid operation and grid management and protection strategies which use increasingly powerful ICT infrastructures.  These “Smart-Grid” technologies can exploit our research into Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining to provide increased resilience and condition monitoring at component and system level with the associated improved maintenance schedules.

A future transport infrastructure must be underpinned by an energy system which can exploit non-polluting sources (renewables, energy harvesting) whilst maintaining resilience. Sustainability must also be extended to systems development and manufacture encompassing life cycle analysis and the use of a circular economy. Furthermore, we must develop energy sustainable future plans for cities.