Key to encouraging mass take-up of low carbon alternatives to conventional vehicles is marrying green credentials with vehicle performance.

ELEVATE (ELEctrochemical Vehicle Advanced TEchnology) – a four-year EPSRC-funded project – is exploring ways to improve low carbon vehicle technologies in an effort to do just that.

Its focus is the development of better materials for energy storage devices – including batteries and supercapacitors – as well as better diagnostics for fuel cells, and a way to support the mass charging of electric vehicles without crashing the national grid.

The £3.3m cross-disciplinary research project – led by Professor Thring, Chair in Fuel Cell Engineering in the School of AACME – draws on expertise in the departments of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Materials and Manufacturing, and brings together academics from the universities of Oxford, Southampton, UCL, and Warwick.

The project also involves eight leading UK companies, including Jaguar Land Rover, Johnson Matthey and Intelligent Energy – a company founded on Loughborough research.

Loughborough’s principal role in the project is to prove that new electrochemical energy storage devices will work in an existing hybrid car.

Building more efficient devices to power low carbon vehicles – including improved economy conventional cars, hybrids, battery and fuel cell electric vehicles – is becoming increasingly important for the UK government as it strives to meet its 2050 targets for CO2 reductions.