2023 winner and finalists

Ceres Power

Ceres has won the 2023 MacRobert Award for its pioneering clean energy technology, including fuel cells for power generation and electrolysers for green hydrogen. The solid oxide cell is based on common low-cost materials that, combined with an innovative deposition technique and a highly differentiated stack technology, delivers the sort of improved performance that will be crucial if the world is to decarbonise at the scale and pace required to tackle climate change.

Ceres has a proprietary technology that is truly reversible. Running in one direction it can use multiple fuels to generate electricity highly efficiently when and where it is needed. Run in reverse, it generates green hydrogen at high efficiencies and low cost—an innovation the MacRobert Award judges praised as a huge breakthrough in the clean energy revolution.

Fuel cells are not a new technology, but exotic material sets, high operating temperatures or the requirement for hydrogen fuel have made them the preserve of space missions. Ceres has pioneered the use of commonly found materials: a gadolinium-doped ceria ceramic membrane as an electrolyte printed onto thin perforated ferritic steel sheets that operate at temperatures in the range of 500–600C. This is a ‘Goldilocks’ temperature for performance, fuel flexibility, cost and robustness.

The result is Ceres’ patented cell technology. One cell is enough to light a room but the 250 megawatts of capacity set to come on stream in 2024 could power half a million homes. Ceres’ licensing model has enabled it to establish partnerships with some of the world's most progressive companies, such as Bosch, Doosan, and Weichai, to deliver systems and products at the scale and pace needed to decarbonise power generation, transportation, industry, and everyday living.

The Ceres Power Team with Academy President Professor Sir Jim McDonald FREng FRSE (left) and HRH The Princess Royal (third from right). Image credit: Jason Alden

The MacRobert Award finalist team from Ceres Power includes:

• Dr Caroline Hargrove FREng, Chief Technology Officer

• Dr Subhasish Mukerjee, Chief Scientific Officer

• Dr Adam Bone, Head of Energy Materials

• Tomasz Domanski, Principal Mechanical Design Engineer

• Nick Lawrence, Director of Advanced Engineering

• Dr Robert Leah, Research Fellow

• Carl Matthews, Senior Principal Manufacturing Engineer

• Fiona-Mairéad McKenna, Chief Engineer Cell

• Dr Mark Selby FREng, Chief Innovation Officer

• Rajan Thandi, Stack Performance Lead

• Dr Chandra Macauley, Senior Scientist

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The 2023 MacRobert Award finalists are:

• nPlan whose machine-learning technology accurately forecasts how long every element of a construction project is likely to take and represents the most dramatic step forward in decades for forecasting and de-risking large-scale construction and infrastructure projects.

• Paragraf for producing the first real commercial use of graphene in electronic devices, rather than as a structural additive in composites.

nPlan

nPlan’s machine-learning technology accurately forecasts how long every element of a construction project is likely to take and represents the most dramatic step forward in decades for forecasting and de-risking large-scale construction and infrastructure projects.

Only one out of every seven construction projects finishes on time. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic the median project delay was approximately 80 days and by the end of 2021 it was over 214 days—an increase of 167%. When projects are delayed, costs balloon, undermining the business case for whatever is being built and putting contractors at risk of insolvency; the knock-on effects include protracted legal disputes, reduced project volume and lower economic growth. nPlan’s system identifies the hidden risks that drive delays, helping project owners and construction companies deliver major projects on time and on budget.

nPlan’s system ingests large volumes of past project schedules—over 600,000 and counting—and uses an AI technique known as deep learning to analyse the data which it then uses to produce individual time-based probability distributions for every component of a construction project. These distributions are also rolled up to accurately forecast the likelihood that any major project will be completed in a given timeframe.

Individuals managing these projects can now make decisions informed by hundreds of thousands of past programmes. nPlan’s pioneering innovation has proved it can save as much as 3% of the cost of a billion-pound project by providing an accurate assessment of delay risk and is set to supersede more traditional methods of project forecasting that suffer from the subjective biases and limited experience of the individuals inputting into them or narrow reference class data.

The MacRobert Award finalist team from nPlan includes:

• Alan Mosca, Co-founder and CTO

• Dev Amratia, Co-founder and CEO

• Vahan Hovhannisyan, Research Lead

• Peter Zachares, Senior Research Scientist

• Sarah Grisman, Operations Director

• Inneke Mayachita, Machine Learning Engineer

• Petra Ivascu, Machine Learning Engineer

• Natalia Culakova, Senior Data Scientist

• Dan Murphy, Senior Data Scientist

• Carlos Ledezma, Product Manager

Paragraf

In a massive breakthrough that will undoubtedly have implications across sectors, Paragraf has produced the first real commercial use of graphene in electronic devices, rather than as a structural additive in composites.

Graphene has long been heralded as the future of electronics since its discoverers won the Nobel prize in 2010. However, it has taken years of development of materials and processing to bring it to practical use. Paragraf has made a monumental contribution to unlocking the material’s true potential by developing a practical method for growing single layer graphene onto a useful substrate to achieve semiconductor-grade purity and defect levels.

This graphene is already present in a wide variety of vital applications via Paragraf’s graphene magnetic field sensors, which are 30 times more sensitive, 1,000 times more energy efficient, and able to operate more reliably in a wider range of conditions than established silicon technology. This includes in gas-turbine aero-engines at high temperatures, in quantum computing at ultra-low temperatures, and in high radiation environments such as in space. The technology is also finding various applications within electric vehicles as part of the safety system monitoring battery performance to reduce the likelihood of critical faults.

The judges shortlisted Paragraf as an example of a leading UK effort to industrialise graphene-based semiconductor devices. This was made possible by an in-depth integration of multi-discipline engineering, from cutting edge material science to electronic engineering, combined with the in-depth understanding of compound semiconductor methods which has resulted in this truly transformative innovation. The sector is thriving globally and there is scope for rapid growth and associated jobs in the UK and much further afield.

The MacRobert Award finalist team from Paragraf includes:

• Dr Simon Thomas FREng, Paragraf founder and CEO

• Professor Sir Colin Humphreys CBE FREng FRS, Paragraf founder and CSO

• Dr Ivor Guiney, Paragraf Technical Director

• Dr Hugh Glass, Paragraf Technology Owner

• Rosie Baines, Paragraf Scientist

• Dr Jaspreet Kainth, Paragraf Growth Scientist

• Dr Lok Yi Lee, Paragraf Senior Scientist