Congratulations to Arutiun Ehiasarian and Alex Shenfield on their Innovate UK – AKT awards
Innovate UK – Accelerated Knowledge Transfer (AKT) is jointly delivered by Innovate UK and Innovate UK Business Connect.
The programme has been designed to create short-term collaborations between a Business Partner and a UK Knowledge Base to rapidly inject innovation capacity. Inspired by the highly successful partnership model of KTP (Knowledge Transfer Partnership), Innovate UK – Accelerated Knowledge Transfer’s concept is to deliver a rapid and targeted intervention (two to four months) to accelerate the evaluation or development of an innovation project or concept, which has the potential for significant impact for the Business Partner.
Innovate UK received 506 AKT applications in Round 2 which closed at the end of last year and have awarded just over £5m of funding to 35% of these – two of which are led by I2Ri academics:
Project Title: Cost-effective hydrogen production with manufacturable coated electrolyser electrodes
Academic Supervisor: Prof Arutiun Ehiasarian
Company Partner: Ionbond UK
Project Summary: Hydrogen is an abundant, high-capacity fuel to store renewable energy and a primary route to reaching Net Zero. However, its production by electrolysis uses expensive precious metals.
The project will develop cost-effective bipolar plates, coated by high-power impulse magnetron sputtering to withstand corrosion in proton-exchange membrane and alkaline water electrolysers.
Professor Ehiasarian, head of the National HIPIMS Technology Centre at SHU has 20 years’ experience researching transition metal nitrides and High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HIPIMS). Arutiun’s pioneering work identified the potential of HIPIMS and led its industrial implementation.
Ionbond provides thin film surface treatments to improve tools and components and operates over 30 coating centres in 15 countries.
Project Title: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Based Real-time Multi-spectral Imaging for Food Safety
Academic Supervisor: Prof Alex Shenfield
Company Partner: Faraday Scientific Ltd
Project Summary: The core aim of this project is to develop an AI-enabled multispectral Imaging (MSI) system for detecting and preventing food safety issues in real-time. This project will produce a bench-top demonstrator of an exemplar food manufacturing process with AI-enhanced MSI detection capable of real-time continuous operation in-line with production processes.
Prof. Shenfield is currently Professor of Machine Learning and the Research Theme Lead for Digital Connectivity and Technology at SHU’s National Centre for Excellence in Food Engineering.
His expertise relevant to this project lies in applying state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to solving real world problems (particularly those faced by food and drink manufacturers).
Faraday Scientific provides solutions for metrology and control applications across the physical, chemical, forensic, materials and biological sciences, and industrial technologies.
