Camborne School of Mines continues success with new Innovate UK grants

The Camborne School of Mines, supported by Exeter Innovation, have been successful with two further bids for grants worth almost £200,000 through Innovate UK’s CLIMATES programme, which focuses on developing circular supply chains for critical materials.

This follows success last year which saw CSM win over £300,000 of funding from the same funding stream.

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Professor Karen Hudson-Edwards was successful with her bid UpReREE in Strand 2 of the CLIMATES call. This is worth £145,139 for a year-long project and has Karen as Principal Investigator (PI), Professor Frances Wall as Co-Investigator, Eva Marquis as Research Fellow, and Richie Chalkley as Research Assistant.

This was a follow up to the current current ReREE Innovate CLIMATES project funded last year, which is establishing feasibility of a novel process to recover rare earth elements from mining tailings for re-entry into a UK supply chain.

The industrial partner on both projects is Altilium, which is pioneering green technologies which can decarbonise automotive supply chains by creating sustainable battery materials from recycling waste streams.

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The Strontium Alternative Magnet Innovation Consortium (SrAMIC), was also successful in strand 1 in securing funding for a nine month project, worth £52,500, with Dr Sam Broom-Fendley as the PI for Exeter.

The project will involve some pilot studies on the feasibility of direct extraction of strontium carbonate for the use in Sr-ferrite magnets, with Dr Rob Fitzpatrick and Professor Frances Wall as Co-Investigators. The companies involved are GeoLithical – a start-up exploration company run by former MSc graduate Ed Loye – and Grinding Solutions Ltd.

Chris Watson, Impact and Partnership Development Officer from Exeter Innovation’s Environment and Clean Growth team, was the business liaison on both bids.

The Camborne School of Mines team have also recently completed a £25,000 contract with Innovate UK’s Knowledge Transfer Network to write an innovation landscape report on extraction within the rare earth and permanent magnet supply chain.

This three month project saw the team work with the British Geological Survey, supported by Exeter Innovation’s Carol-Lynne Pettit and Chris Watson.

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More Information

Interested in knowing more about this work? Please speak to Chris Watson or visit our Sustainability and Environment webpage to learn more.