The University of Sheffield’s Translational Energy Research Centre will be opening for use as a research, testing and innovation facility for academics and industry partners in early 2021, having been built throughout 2020.
Part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the £21 million centre houses exciting pilot-scale rigs, some of which are the first of their kind in the UK, and will support research into zero-carbon solutions and renewable energy across a range of areas.
Located at the University’s Advanced Manufacturing Campus, next to Factory 2050, construction of the new facility is almost complete, and the infrastructure and equipment can soon start to be fitted. The centre will expand on the work of PACT and will bring increased space, more test days and advanced testing capability for academics looking to engineer sustainable, low-carbon solutions to complex energy problems.
The facility will host equipment used in research into, among other things, carbon capture, utilisation and storage, biomass, hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuels and energy storage. The pilot-scale testing opportunities mean that research can be taken from bench level to the next stage, where methodologies can be tested and better understood in order to speed up the process of bringing new products and services to wider use. That means that the Translational Energy Research Centre will be integral in developing new sustainable fuels, finding ways to generate and store clean, renewable energy and furthering our knowledge of how to decarbonise industrial processes.
The facility is set up to allow a ‘plug-and-play’ approach to research, where visiting teams can join their own technology with the centre’s equipment in order to enhance testing. One piece of equipment which will be in place at the Translational Energy Research Centre is the first-of-its-kind sustainable aviation fuel pilot plant, which is fully automatic and capable of producing liquid fuels from coal, biomass and gas, at a production capacity of 36 litres of fuel per day with 75% conversion efficiency. The equipment list also features an electrolyser for green hydrogen production and a molten carbonate fuel cell, a next generation piece of technology to capture CO2 and produce electrical energy simultaneously.
The research centre, once opened and active in June 2021, will be available for academics wanting to test technology at a Technology Readiness Level of 3-6, as well as partnerships with national and international organisations and local SMEs. Find out more about the Translational Energy Research Centre in the full brochure here [link].
To get in touch, email terc@sheffield.ac.uk. You can also follow progress on @TERCfacilities on Twitter.