The grant, awarded to a team led by Professor Matthew Rosseinsky of the University of Liverpool, will support the programme; Integration of Computation and Experiment for Accelerated Materials Discovery.
Prof Rosseinsky will head up a team at Liverpool and University College London that will work to tackle the challenge of designing and testing new materials at the atomic level and aims to keep the UK ahead in the global materials competition.
"With the approaches we will develop, we aim to address problems such as how to create materials for sustainable energy production and storage such as safer new battery technologies or the efficient capture and utilisation of solar energy," Prof Rosseinsky said. "We will combine computation and experiment to discover new materials, developing methods that combine calculation with chemical understanding."
The programme will exploit its discoveries and share its approach with its commercial partners via the Knowledge Centre for Materials Chemistry and the new Materials Innovation Factory, a state-of-the-art materials research facility for both academic and industrial users.
"The work planned as part of this programme grant promises to find new materials that will have many applications in the energy sector," Professor Philip Nelson, EPSRC's chief executive, said. "This grant will be supporting some of the UK's talented scientists and help achieve EPSRC's vision to make the UK the best place in the world to research, discover and innovate."
