Catalysing Green Innovation (strand 1): Advancing Power Electronics, Machines and Drives (PEMD) Supply Chain

Deadline: 29-Jul-20

UK registered businesses can apply for a share of up to £5 million to develop supply chain capability for power electronics, machines and drives (PEMD).

Due to the disruption caused by COVID-19 to UK industry, Driving the Electric Revolution, part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund is investing up to £5 million in innovation projects that will support the UK’s continued push towards net zero carbon.

This is part of a larger effort to catalyse the green economic recovery in transport, energy and industrial sectors.

In this strand, up to £5 million will be invested in business-led innovation projects that enable UK supply chain and manufacturing capability growth in power electronics, machines and drives (PEMD). Projects will facilitate future improvements in productivity, capacity, quality or efficiency.

Projects must be:

collaborative
exist as a distinct separate project in its own right
able to start by 1 November 2020
able to show a demonstrable benefit to the UK PEMD supply chain, ideally impact on multiple sectors, exploitable through future activities and demonstrate significant return on investment

Themes

Your project can focus on one or more of the following:

Manufacturing process development, such as:
- innovations and approaches to improve manufacturing productivity
- implementation of an innovative new tool into a process line
- automation of a specific process
- reconfiguring a process line in an innovative way to improve productivity or flexibility
Design for manufacture, such as:
- designing/redesigning a product where the focus is on how you manufacture it more efficiently and cost effectively
- specification of a manufacturing process
- virtual process development (VPD) including improvements in modelling and simulation software
- developments which enable products to be manufactured with recycling taken into consideration
Circular economy, including:
- scale-up of processes for the recycling and recovery of materials from end-of-life PEMD products
- life-cycle and embedded carbon analysis with a view of process improvement
- waste reduction and process energy efficiency improvements
Innovative testing and validation processes:
- virtual product validation
- scale-up and/or automation of testing and validation processes, with an aim of increasing productivity

Funding Information

Your project’s total eligible costs must be between £100,000 and £500,000.

Eligibility Criteria

Any UK registered business claiming grant funding must be eligible to receive state aid at the time they confirm you will be awarded funding. It is not possible to award grant funding to organisations meeting the condition known as undertakings in difficulty.
Your project must:
- have total eligible costs between £100,000 and £500,000
- start by 1 November 2020
- last between 3 and 9 months
To lead a project your organisation must:
- be a UK registered business of any size
- collaborate with other UK registered businesses, research organisations, public sector organisations or charities
- carry out its project work in the UK
- intend to exploit the results in the UK
To collaborate with the lead, your UK registered organisation must be one of the following:
- business
- academic institution
- charity
- not-for-profit
- public sector organisation or
- research and technology organisation (RTO)
Your organisation must carry out its project work and intend to exploit the results in the UK.
The lead and at least one other organisation must claim funding by entering their costs during the application.
Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project.
Partners must enter their own project costs into the Innovation Funding Service.
Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding, for example non-UK businesses. Their costs will count towards the total eligible project costs.