Organic solar cells (OSCs) have the potential to become an environmental friendly, inexpensive, large area and flexible photovoltaics technology. Their main advantages are low process temperatures, the potential for very low cost due to abundant materials and scalable processing, and the possibility of producing flexible devices on plastic substrates. To improve their commercialization capacity, to compete with established power generation and to complement other renewable energy technologies, the performance of state-of-the-art OSCs needs to be further improved. Our goals within SEPOMO – Spins in Efficient Photovoltaic devices based on Organic Molecules – are to bring the performance of OSCs forward by taking advantage of the so far unexplored degree of freedom of photogenerated species in organic materials, their spin. This challenging idea provides a unified platform for the excellent research to promote the world-wide position of Europe in the field of organic photovoltaics and electronics, and to train strongly motivated early stage researchers (ESRs) for a career in science and technology oriented industry that is rapidly growing. Our scientific objectives are to develop several novel routes to enhance the efficiency of OSC by understanding and exploiting the electronic spin interactions. This will allow us to address crucial bottlenecks in state-of-the-art OSCs: we will increase the quantum efficiency by reducing the dominant recombination losses and by enhancing the light harvesting and exciton generation, e.g. by means of internal upconversion of excited states. Our ESRs will be trained within this interdisciplinary (physics, chemistry, engineering) and intersectoral (academia, R&D center, enterprise) consortium in highly relevant fundamental yet application-oriented research with the potential to commercialise the results. The hard and soft skills learned in our network are central for the ESRs to pursue their individual careers in academics or industry.

The Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials (BCFN) is an EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training at the forefront of creative graduate training, equipping students to meet global grand challenges. The BCFN focus is to produce the highest quality students capable of designing, measuring and understanding advanced functional materials from their fundamental components, to their real-world applications. This is achieved by breaking down the traditional boundaries of chemistry, physics, biology and engineering, and providing training in a highly creative, adaptive and flexible way. Functional materials, and their characterisation, are vital to the UK economy, and are found in a very diverse range of application sectors including medicine, energy, food and coatings, in a wide range of high value products and are key to fundamental aspects of science. Understanding materials across all length scales and application areas is pivotal to our success - there is therefore a clear need for highly-skilled graduates, and an understanding of materials across all length scales is pivotal to our success. The global market for advanced materials is predicted to be $957bn by 2015, and we are committed to providing cohorts of skilled scientists who can lead innovation in both academia and industry. Our approach is to embed the training program into every aspect of the student experience. This means that the students receive the strongest possible scientific foundations through taught courses and research projects but also develop a fully rounded set of skills, including communication, team working, entrepreneurship and creativity. We have a proven track record of excellence in graduate training and have pioneered innovative tools where the needs of the student are at the core. These have included new online learning tools, a mixture of short- and long-term research projects to promote choice and a wider research experience, and intense involvement with industry which allows students to be exposed to "realworld" problems, ensuring that their creativity is always directed towards finding solutions. We have an extensive expert network of supervisors who deliver the training, whilst collaborating to create new research areas. Our network has more than 100 academics from 15 departments across four faculties at the University of Bristol, aswell as industrial partners. This ensures that the BCFN research and training can adapt to the changing needs of both the UK and global demands for materials. Our centre is located at the nexus of funding council priority areas, and has studentship support (3 p.a.), staff funding, and dedicated space support from the University. From 2014, we will build on our strong foundations and evolve our training. Our links with industry will be strengthened further and via our Bristol-Industry Graduate Engagement (BRIDGE) program we will build sustainable, long-term research platforms to ensure a true benefit to the economy. We will take our successful training model and create a distance learning platform which can be used by partners overseas and in industry through innovative e-learning. We will run summer schools with these partners to expand the training experience for both BCFN students and partners alike. We will continue our extensive public engagement with schools, the general public and policy makers, ensuring that at all stages we communicate with our stakeholders and receive feedback. We have a strong student-focussed management team to ensure quality and delivery. This team, composed of a Director, Principal, co-Principal, Teaching Fellow, Industrial Research Fellow and Manager, and a wider Operational Team drawn from our core departments of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, represent a wide range of research experience from Fellows of the Royal Society to early career fellows, covering a range of strengths in functional materials with proven leadership and research track records.

Our vision is to use continuous photochemistry and electrochemistry to transform how fine chemicals, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals are manufactured in the UK. We aim to minimize the amount of chemicals, solvents and processing steps needed to construct complex molecules. We will achieve this by exploiting light and/or electricity to promote more specific chemical transformations and cleaner processes. By linking continuous photochemistry and electro-chemistry with thermal flow chemistry and environmentally acceptable solvents, we will create a toolkit with the power to transform all aspects of chemical synthesis from initial discovery through to chemical manufacturing of high-value molecules. The objective is to increase efficiency in terms of both atoms and energy, resulting in lower cost, low waste, low solvent footprints and shorter manufacturing routes. Historically photo- and electro-chemistry have been under-utilised in academia and industry because they are perceived to be complicated to use, difficult to scale up and engineer into viable processes despite their obvious environmental, energy and cost benefits. We will combine the strategies and the skills needed to overcome these barriers and will open up new areas of science, and deliver a step-change (i) providing routes to novel molecular architectures, hard to reach or even inaccessible by conventional methodologies, (ii) eliminating many toxic reagents by rendering them unnecessary, (iii) minimizing solvent usage, (iv) promoting new methodologies for synthetic route planning. Our proposal is supported by 21 industrial partners covering a broad range of sectors of the chemistry-using industries who are offering £1.23M in-kind support. Therefore, we will study a broad range of reactions to provide a clear understanding of the most effective areas for applying our techniques; we will evaluate strategies for altering the underlying photophysics and kinetics so as to accelerate the efficiency of promising reactions; we will transform our current designs of photochemical and electrochemical reactors, with a combination of engineering, modelling and new fabrication techniques to maximize their efficiency and to provide clear opportunities for scale-up; we will exploit on-line analytics to accelerate the optimisation of continuous photochemical and electrochemical reactions; we will design and build a new generation of reactors for new applications; we will identify the most effective strategies for linking our reactors into integrated multi-step continuous processes with minimized waste; we will demonstrate this integration on at least one synthesis of a representative pharmaceutical target molecule on a larger scale; we will apply a robust series of sustainability metrics to benchmark our approaches against current manufacturing.

Nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS) are integrated miniature devices that can sense or actuate on the nanoscale, while generating observable effects on the macroscale. They are beginning to shape into one of the key technologies of the 21st century, which has the potential to revolutionize both industrial and consumer products, transforming the way we live and work through a multitude of applications (ranging from displays, smart phones, portable electronics and computer peripherals to cars, medical diagnostics and therapy, metrology and navigation). However, nanoscopic mechanical motion underpinning the functionality of such systems is often affected by a number of parasitic effects and the chief among them is stiction - unintentional adhesion of moving parts leading to a catastrophic failure of the devices. Correspondingly, the ability to engage and control reliably mechanical movements in NEMS is the main challenge of the technology. We believe that by combining NEMS with liquid crystals we can meet this challenge in a simple yet efficient manner and develop a new generation of NEMS - stiction-free hybrid nano-electro-mechanical systems, which will feature dynamically adjustable behaviour and field-programmable functions. Our approach exploits elastic distortions in liquid crystals coupled to nanoscopic mechanical motion in operating NEMS. By engaging transitions between various structural phases of liquid crystals and their susceptibility to a wide range of stimuli (i.e. heat, light, electric and magnetic fields) we will introduce a mechanism for tuning dynamically the response characteristics of the resulting hybrids and eliminate the need for additional integrated circuitry, thus, reducing the overall complexity and cost of the devices. A broad spectrum of structural transitions exhibited by liquid crystals (when confined at the nanoscale) should further enrich the behavior of such hybrid NEMS as actuators, sensors, relays, re-configurable metamaterials and plasmonic circuits, making the development of adaptive and 'smart' nanosystems a practical proposition.