Mobile menu icon
Skip to navigation | Skip to main content | Skip to footer
Mobile menu icon Search iconSearch
Search type

Tyndall Manchester

Tyndall capabilities, modelling environmental processes

Modelling environmental and engineering processes and impacts

We have an experienced team of modellers undertaking cutting-edge research on environmental and engineering processes, to evaluate and improve greenhouse gas performance and sustainability, and to minimise environmental impacts.

We collaborate with a range of stakeholders, including academics, industry and policy makers and advisors, and utilise our modelling capability in a range of sectors including renewable energy, land-use assessment, bioenergy and whole systems research. 

Core competency

Our specialisms include: life cycle assessment (inc. carbon footprinting); techno-economic assessment and financial appraisals; land-use and resource assessment; whole-systems modelling; process modelling; information system analyses (GIS) and advanced statistical analyses.

We apply these specialisms within the built environment; land and environmental systems; engineering and energy processes; energy systems and within resource and product life cycles.

We are equally experienced in developing custom design models tailored to specific problems as we are at applying specialist software packages including: ArcGIS, SimaPro, MATLAB, R and IES Virtual Environment.

Differentiators

Our modelling work is developed with stakeholders (including governments and industry) through iterative steps, where outputs inform subsequent analysis steps, enabling us to generate analysis with highly relevant information for those involved. Our approach offers transparency, with the power of the peer review system to scrutinise results and increase impact.

Focusing on energy and climate change, in addition to our core knowledge of engineering processes and systems, places us in a unique position to bring academic rigour to real world problems. Our researchers each have highly specialist modelling knowledge, enabling us to provide unique solutions to both broad-ranging and niche problems. Furthermore, the team are highly interdisciplinary, allowing us to approach problems holistically.

Track record

We have been integrating modelling approaches in interdisciplinary energy and climate change projects since 2000, delivering projects funded by a wide range of bodies including: EPSRC, NERC, UKERC, BEIS (DECC), ETI, DEFRA, DfT, DTI, North East Process Industries Cluster, Tesco, Electricity Northwest and Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

Previous and live projects cover a wide range of topics, including:

  1. Identify and evaluate the wider sustainability impacts of the UK’s bioenergy sector that maximise the benefits of bioenergy to the energy trilemma of affordability, resilience and carbon.
  2. Evaluate the role and impact of selected bioenergy pathways at appropriate deployment scales on the energy system and interfacing sectors.
  3. Identify and select appropriate energy vectors and determine how these fit within a wider bio refinery strategy to reduce carbon and reliance on fossil fuel, while maximising national and regional resilience.
  4. Identify and select energy and cost optimised routes to achieve vectors and technologies that fit with the overall environmental vision of the Hub.
  • EPSRC funded research including the WISE-PV project, where Tyndall Manchester Researchers developed a model to simulate building scale PV-battery systems, linked to economic and LCA datasets to evaluate the effect of PV and storage on building’s financial and environmental performance.
  • Detailed analysis by Tyndall Centre Researchers based on the IMAGE Global Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) results to provide recommendations for the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on the feasibility of BECCS within climate change emission scenarios.
  • EPSRC Impact Acceleration project where a Tyndall Manchester Researcher was embedded within the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to develop an LCA modelling tool to analyse the GHG performance UK bioenergy scenarios to directly inform UK renewable heat policy decisions. Journal of Cleaner Production.
  • Working with Electricity North West to apply a Scenario Modelling Tool developed as part of the RCUK RESNET project, used to analyse power demand profiles for 2030 and 2050 under scenarios of varying electrification. Air conditioning demand assessment