Engineering projects awarded £13.6m by EPSRC

The research, funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will investigate re-using carbon, the fundamental design of major infrastructure constructs, and the way in which the complex behaviour of fluid flows are predicted.

Sheffield University’s Prof Ray Allen has received a £4.5m grant to look into new ways to capture CO₂ efficiently and to study how it can be converted into a fuel.

Allen will lead a team made up of Sheffield, University College London, Queen’s University Belfast and Manchester University.

They will focus on a recently developed solvent that has been shown to be an efficient sorbent of CO₂ and look at reducing the captured CO₂ to a syngas. The team will also work to ensure its research outcomes are sustainable and economically viable.

A further £4.2m has been awarded to Prof David Wagg and his research team from the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Sheffield, Southampton and Swansea. They aim to create new methods for designing complex structures such as bridges and aircraft, which often suffer from unwanted vibrations.