Fiona's laboratory is full of cells that have been asked to fail honestly. She works on degradation, scale-up, and the industrial chemistry of not catching fire.
She has a low tolerance for slideware and a high tolerance for people who bring data.
Her central argument, made patiently and often, is that most cell testing is done against duty cycles chosen for convenience rather than realism, and that the resulting lifetime predictions are therefore decorative. Her group builds test regimes from measured site data — including the awkward periods when a plant sits idle, which turn out to matter a great deal.
She also runs the safety side of this work seriously. Thermal runaway, hydrogen accumulation and the behaviour of a system during an unplanned shutdown are all treated as design inputs rather than as risk-register entries to be written at the end.
Selected projects
Named work, with a sentence of context each.
Duty-cycle degradation study
Rebuilt an industrial partner's accelerated ageing protocol around twelve months of measured site data, which changed the projected replacement interval by rather more than the client had hoped.
Electrolyser stack scale-up review
Independent technical review of a stack design ahead of a funding round, identifying two manufacturing steps that would not survive a tenfold increase in throughput.
Hydrogen materials compatibility programme
Systematic embrittlement testing of candidate materials for a distribution retrofit, reported with the failures given the same prominence as the successes.
Working with MacLeod
She will ask for the duty cycle, the tariff and the failure data before she will discuss a test matrix. If the duty cycle does not exist, establishing it becomes the first work package, and she will say so at the first meeting.
Her reports state what was measured, against what reference, and what the data does not support. Clients who want a favourable summary should expect a courteous refusal and an accurate document.
Looking for
Partners with a real duty cycle and a willingness to share failure data.
Probably not for
Anyone seeking validation of a cell chemistry without disclosing how it was made.
Credits and contributions
- Author of an open protocol for reporting cell degradation against measured duty cycles
- Technical assessor for two energy innovation funding programmes
- Adviser to a Scottish industrial decarbonisation cluster