FARADAY COHORT EVENT: LESSONS LEARNED

Recently, I attended Faraday cohort event on behalf of the VALUABLE project as Lead Project Manager (LPM). It was organised by the Faraday Institution (FI) at the National Motorcycle Museum. The FI brought together all the projects awarded a grant part of the national effort to lead the charge on UK’s electrification.

​​The event started with an overview presentation of the Fast Start projects, led by university consortia and supported by the automotive industry nationwide. At VALUABLE we have been looking closely at the RE-LIB project. This project works to grow research knowledge to support a recycling industry to thrive in the UK.

Following the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre, UKBIC, was presented. The UKBIC is an ambitious development for a pilot battery manufacturing plant that will be available to the industry by 2020. Then each of the representatives for the Faraday Battery Challenge, FBC, funded projects, included VALUABLE, stand up on stage for a 3-min pitch to present the project. The pitch for VALUABLE attracted great attention as it looks at an area sometimes neglected, waste! Few of the attendees approach me to discuss synergies between our FBC projects as well about how HSSMI and the rest of partners can support their businesses.

Particularly the circular economy, my area of expertise, is very hype now but not much knowledge is built within the companies yet so HSSMI work can be really pivotal in realising the potential for your business. Other areas like remanufacturing of batteries, how to bring back to new a broken battery, or reuse of cells for other applications like home energy storage or off-grid supplies were of great interest. Our partners in the VALUABLE project, Aspire Engineering and Aceleron were there too and had the opportunity to discuss remanufacturing and reuse respectively.
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I am glad the Knowledge Transfer Network and UKRI put together this event as it has been a great opportunity to exploit our work in the project and showcase the capabilities of each of the partners. If you would like to know more about the project or what each of the partners can do for your business gives us a shout.