Dr Michael Hope, Department of Chemistry, has been announced as the recipient of a prestigious EPSRC Open Fellowship award, worth £1.4 million, helping him drive the transition to clean renewable energy. This transition requires cheaper and more efficient ways of harnessing and storing energy, which is fundamentally limited by the properties of current materials.

Dr Hope said:

“I’m delighted to become an EPSRC Fellow. The Fellowship will be a real springboard for my new research group at the University of Warwick, funding two PhD students and a postdoc, as well as lots of exciting new equipment to perform research into cutting-edge materials for energy generation and storage.”

By studying the structure of the materials in devices at the atomic level, Dr Hope will link the structure to the materials properties that dictate how well they perform. This will help to design new materials with better performance.

To reveal the structure of materials, solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy will be used. This is a technique related to MRI, but to probe individual atoms within materials. NMR is particularly well-suited to complex and nanoscale materials, which are challenging to study with other techniques.

Dr Hope said:

“I will focus on materials for energy storage and generation including batteries and solar cells. Using NMR I will reveal the structural factors that limit the performance of these materials in real-world applications, thereby guiding the design of improved materials. I am particularly excited to combine the development of new NMR methodologies to study cutting-edge materials under operational conditions.”

One of the materials Dr Hope will focus on will be hybrid perovskites. Hybrid perovskites offer the promise of next-generation solar cells with higher efficiency and lower production costs than the current silicon-based options. However, their commercialisation is held back by how much they degrade under normal conditions, particularly exposure to light.

Dr Hope added:

“I will study the effects of light illumination on the structure and dynamics of perovskite materials, to understand how they degrade and, therefore, how to protect against degradation. This will require new experiments to measure the NMR spectra of device-relevant thin-film samples on exposure to light.”

By championing sustainable research, such as Dr Hope’s vital work on batteries and solar cells, The University of Warwick is committed to creating a more sustainable world. Its Strategy 2030 sets out five key sustainability pathways to follow, including achieving Net Zero carbon emissions from scopes 1 and 2 by 2030, and scope 3 by 2050.

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