The Department for Transport of UK government announced to ban petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030 to facilitate Net Zero strategy. Being a major part of transportation electrification, the electric vehicle (EV) market is growing quickly; there are 190,727 new registrations of pure-EVs in 2021, 76.3% increase compared to 2020. Despite such success, the driving range and fast charge capability of EVs are recognised as predominant factors limiting further market penetration. Unfortunately, the physics of these requirements results in a trade-off of the lithium-ion battery design strategy. For instance, cells with high energy density provide maximum range but cannot deliver fast charging, because thicker electrodes suffer more acutely from the concentration polarisation across the electrode due to the slow ionic transport. Likewise, cells with high power density are capable of fast charging, but suffer from low mileage. More impetus in fundamental studies on physical processes of battery and the interplay between microstructure and performance are needed to eliminate range anxiety and charge-time trauma of EVs. Graphite/silicon composite electrode is regarded as one of the most promising candidates for next-generation automotive LiBs due to its high energy density. However, it suffers from the major drawbacks such as (1) volume expansion, cracking and pulverization of Si particles; (2) fast decay of capacity due to side reactions, consuming electrolyte rapidly. There is great potential to mitigate the degradation mechanisms by improved compositional and structural design based on better understanding of the ambiguous synergistic effect between the two types of particles. Moreover, lithium plating on the graphitic negative electrode is regarded as the foremost safety concern restricting the fast charge capability, leading to the consumption of lithium, electrolyte decomposition, formation of lithium dendrite and even thermal runaway. Therefore, it is critical to suppress lithium plating employing electrode design, manufacturing and rational protocols to address the longstanding challenge of battery fast charging. In this project, we aim to develop scalable and widely applicable innovations to facilitate the advancement of battery technologies for transport electrification. Correlative in operando experiment coupling the chemical, structure, crystallographic and electrochemical information from 2D to 4D will be conducted to elucidate the failure mechanisms of the graphite/Si composite electrode at the micrometer scale, particularly the synergistic dynamics of charge transfer, lithiation and deformation. Structural evolution is characterised as a function of SOC, C-rates and Si content, and linked to the capacity decay. Advanced 3D microstructure-resolved electro-chemo-mechanical model will be developed to analyse the performance limiting mechanisms, the impact of microstructural evolution on the reaction heterogeneities and predict the cycle life; in operando experiment and 3D microstructure-resolved phase field modelling will be employed to reveal the interplay between 3D microstructure of the electrode with the phase separation phenomenon, spatial dynamics of lithiation and plating. In addition, the physical processes of the relaxation behaviour, such as lithium exchange and redistribution will be elucidated by the 3D model, which will provide valuable guidelines for the refinement of fast charge protocols in terms of the timing and period of the rest steps. Finally, building on the insights of the study above, graphite/Si composite electrodes with novel structures will be fabricated, aiming to achieve at least 280 Wh kg-1 at the cell level with 20 mins charging for 50% of the capacity, corresponding to 15% increase in energy density and over 30% decrease of charging time compared to the commercial cells; an advanced physics-based fast charge protocol will be delivered to mitigate the plating risk and capacity fade.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Rapidly developing digital technologies, together with social and business trends, are providing huge opportunities for innovation in product and service markets, and also in government processes. Technology developments drive socioeconomic and behavioural changes and vice versa, and the rate of change in these makes tracking and responding to high-speed developments a significant challenge in public and private sectors alike. Agile governance and policy-making for emerging technologies is likely to become a key theme in strategic thinking for the public and private sectors. Particular trends that are challenging now, and will increasingly challenge society include developments in technologies on the outskirts of the internet. These include Artificial Intelligence, not just in the cloud but in Edge computing, and in Internet of Things devices and networks. Alongside and in conjunction with this ecosystem, is Distributed Ledger Technology. Together this ensemble of technologies will enable innovations that promote productivity, like peer-to-peer dynamic contracts and other decision processes, with or without human sight or intervention. However, the ensemble's autonomy, proliferation and use in critical applications, makes the potential for hacking and similar attacks very significant, with the likelihood of them growing to become an issue of strategic national importance. To address this challenge, and to preserve the immense economic and productivity benefits that will come from the successful deployment and application of digital technologies 'at the edge', a focused initiative is needed. Ideally, this will use the UK's current platform of experience in the safe and secure application of the Internet of Things. The contributors to this platform include PETRAS partners, and several other centres of excellence around the UK. It is therefore proposed to build an inclusive PETRAS 2 Research Centre with national strategic value, on the established and successful platform of the PETRAS Hub. This will inherit its governance and management models, which have demonstrated the ability to coordinate and convene collaboration across 11 universities and 110 industrial and government User Partners, but will importantly step up its mission and inclusivity through open research calls for new and existing academic partners. PETRAS 2 will maintain an agile and shared research agenda that views social and physical science challenges with equal measure, and covers a broad range of Technology Readiness Levels, particularly those close to market. It will operate as a virtual centre, providing a magnet for collaboration for user partners and a single expert voice for government. User partner engagement is likely to be strong following the successes of the current PETRAS programme, which has raised over £1m in cash contributions from partners during 2018. The new PETRAS 2 'Secure Digital Technologies at the Edge' methodology will inherit the best of PETRAS, including open calls to the UK research community and a partnership-building fund that allows a responsive approach to opportunities that emerge from existing and new user and academic partnerships. PETRAS 2 will be driven by sectoral cybersecurity priorities while retaining a discovery research agenda to horizon-scan and develop understanding of new threats and opportunities. The scope of projects and the associated Innovate UK SDTaP demonstrators, spans early to late TRLs and aims to put knowledge into real user partner practice. Furthermore, the development of many early career researchers through PETRAS 2 research activities should lead to a step change in our national capability and capacity to address this highly dynamic area of socio-technical opportunity and risk.

As the pressures of climate change becomes larger there is great interest in making highly efficient methods for generating and storing electrical energy. There is enormous interest in making batteries that exploit various lithium-based materials. These devices contain a solid anode and a solid cathode immersed in either a polymer, or solvent based electrolyte. Efficient batteries require that the thickness of both the cathode and anode materials are small in order both to reduce electrical resistance and to allow lithium to rapidly insert and de-insert itself from the solid electrode materials (by a process called intercalating). Furthermore they require that the surface area of the interface between the electrolyte and the anode (and cathode) should be made as large as possible in order to give sufficient lithium intercalation to allow practical levels of charging and discharging. As a result of these requirements batteries are currently designed with a nanostructured anode (and cathode) made either in a organised manner or by pressing grains together. Understanding how such nanostructures should be optimised in order to maximise energy efficiency is a major challenge. This is further complicated by the fact that the solid materials expand significantly (up to three times) when lithium is intercalated during charge and discharge of the battery creating both mechanical deformations and changes in the electrochemical behaviour of the surfaces. In order for such designs to be understood, and to be optimised, requires mathematical models to be developed and analysed that account for the critical properties of the nanostructure, the intercalation processes and the electrical properties of the materials. To replace existing high-efficiency high-cost silicon based solar cells there is significant interest in developing inexpensive polymer-based, and dye-sensitised, solar cells.Design of solar cells may seem unconnected from batteries but there is considerable similarity in the physical processes, mathematical models and geometry of the nanostructure of both these devices which provide the opportunity for a concerted theoretical program of research with significant technology transfer. Both types of solar cell that we consider here consist of two materials with different electrochemical properties separated by an interface (in the case of a dye-sensitised solar cell this interface is coated with a photo-absorbing dye monolayer). Efficient solar absorbtion requires that the interface between the two main materials is as large as possible while maintaining good electrical conduction. Nanostrucutred materials are being explored in order to meet these requirements. In order to optimise solar cell design models are required that account for solar absorbtion, the complex geometry of the nanostructure and charge transportation in the materials and across the interface.The purpose of this proposal is to develop novel mathematical techniques and models motivated by and closely aligned to practical developments in the complex nanostructure of these electrochemical systems. By analysing such models the most important mechanisms and features of the devices in determining their efficiency will be explored and identified.

Cloud computing promises to revolutionise how companies, research institutions and government organisations, including the National Health Service (NHS), offer applications and services to users in the digital economy. By consolidating many services as part of a shared ICT infrastructure operated by cloud providers, cloud computing can reduce management costs, shorten the deployment cycle of new services and improve energy efficiency. For example, the UK government's G-Cloud initiative aims to create a cloud ecosystem that will enable government organisations to deploy new applications rapidly, and to share and reuse existing services. Citizens will benefit from increased access to services, while public-sector ICT costs will be reduced. Security considerations, however, are a major issue holding back the widespread adoption of cloud computing: many organisations are concerned about the confidentiality and integrity of their users' data when hosted in third-party public clouds. Today's cloud providers struggle to give strong security guarantees that user data belonging to cloud tenants will be protected "end-to-end", i.e. across the entire workflow of a complex cloud-hosted distributed application. This is a challenging problem because data protection policies associated with applications usually require the strict isolation of certain data while permitting the sharing of other data. As an example, consider a local council with two applications on the G-Cloud: one for calculating unemployment benefits and one for receiving parking ticket fines, with both applications relying on a shared electoral roll database. How can the local council guarantee that data related to unemployment benefits will never be exposed to the parking fine application, even though both applications share a database and the cloud platform? The focus of the CloudSafetNet project is to rethink fundamentally how platform-as-a-service (PaaS) clouds should handle security requirements of applications. The overall goal is to provide the CloudSafetyNet middleware, a novel PaaS platform that acts as a "safety net", protecting against security violations caused by implementation flaws in applications ("intra-tenant security") or vulnerabilities in the cloud platform itself ("inter-tenant security"). CloudSafetyNet follows a "data-centric" security model: the integrity and confidentiality of application data is protected according to data flow policies -- agreements between cloud tenants and the provider specifying the permitted and prohibited exchanges of data between application components. It will enforce data flow policies through multiple levels of security mechanisms following a "defence-in-depth" strategy: based on policies, it creates "data compartments" that contain one or more components and isolate user data. A small privileged kernel, which is part of the middleware and constitutes a trusted computing base (TCB), tracks the flow of data between compartments and prevents flows that would violate policies. Previously such information flow control (IFC) models have been used successfully to enhance programming language, operating system and web application security. To make such a secure PaaS platform a reality, we plan to overcome a set of research challenges. We will explore how cloud application developers can express data-centric security policies that can be translated automatically into a set of data flow constraints in a distributed system. An open problem is how these constraints can be tied in with trusted enforcement mechanisms that exist in today's PaaS clouds. Addressing this will involve research into new lightweight isolation and sand-boxing techniques that allow the controlled execution of software components. In addition, we will advance software engineering methodology for secure cloud applications by developing new software architectures and design patterns that are compatible with compartmentalised data flow enforcement.