This project will deliver new computational modelling tools that will allow engineers working onsafety critical structures to rationally assess the effects of crack initiation and crack propagation. Suchproblems have to date remained intractable. The research will permit unprecedented understanding of crackpropagation, thereby delivering less conservative designs, and, most importantly avoid unpredictedcatastrophic failures in service. This is possible by building upon the recent success of the extended finite elementmethod (XFEM), which has emerged as a revolutionary simulation tool for modelling discontinuities and has the potential to require an order of magnitude less engineering time than conventional methods.Yet, this new method requires much reliability improvements to invade industry. By leveraging recent theoreticaland numerical developments and working hand-in-hand with future users, this project has the potential toprovide XFEM with the accuracy and robustness it requires to become the new tool of choice for structuralintegrity predictions and reconcile accuracy and computational tractability.Cracks or defects are almost always present in engineering structures. In aerospace engineering for instance, during the life of the aircraft (take offs, flights and landings), these cracks will grow under the influence of the forces applied to the structure. How do engineers ensure that, despite these growing cracks, the aircraft can still be operated safely? The idea is to regularly inspect the aircraft to monitor the major cracks. The next question is to know how often should an aircraft be inspected to prevent catastrophic failure between two inspections. To answer this question, engineers must be able to evaluate the time (number of flights) it takes for the cracks to become fatal to the structure. If it takes 1,000 flights, the maximum inspection interval should be less than 1,000. To estimate the time to failure, engineers use computer methods, where they model the behaviour of the structure using various simplifications: this is known as Damage Tolerance Analysis (DTA).However, today, existing software are still unable to provide engineers with a rational tool to assess the tolerance of a structure to damage. The proposed research has the long-term goal to provide this tool which could provide a paradigm shift in the way engineers think about simulating fracture, whereby sufficient accuracy would not be synonymous with intractable computational time or manpower.

Bladder cancer is among the most expensive diseases in oncology in terms of treatment costs; each procedure requires days of hospitalisation and recurrence rates are high. Current unmet clinical needs can be addressed by optical methods due to the combination of non-invasive and real-time capture of unprecedented biomedical information. The MIB objective is to provide robust, easy-to-use, cost-effective optical methods with superior sensitivity and specificity to enable a step-change in point-of-care diagnostics of bladder cancer. The concept relies on combining optical methods (optical coherence tomography, multi-spectral opto-acoustic tomography, shifted excitation Raman difference spectroscopy, and multiphoton microscopy) providing structural, biochemical and functional information. The hypothesis is that such combination enables in situ diagnosis of bladder cancer with superior sensitivity and specificity due to unprecedented combined anatomic, biochemical and molecular tissue information. The step-change is that this hybrid concept is provided endoscopically for in vivo clinical use. The project relies on development of new light sources, high-speed imaging systems, unique imaging fibre bundles, and endoscopes, combined and applied clinically. The consortium comprises world-leading academic organisations in a strong partnership with innovative SMEs and clinical end-users. Through commercialization of this novel imaging platform, MIB is expected to reinforce leading market positions in medical devices and healthcare for the SMEs in areas where European industry is already strong. The impact is that improved diagnostic procedures facilitate earlier onset of effective treatment, thus recurrence and follow-up procedures would be reduced by 10%, i.e., reducing costs. Using MIB technology, healthcare cost savings in the order of 360M€ are expected for the whole EU. Equally important, prognosis and patient quality of life would improve drastically.

This research brings together the complementary expertise of our consortium members to gain a better understanding of the physics in hydraulic fracturing (HF) with the final goal to optimize HF practices and to assess the environmental risks related to HF. This requires the development and implementation of reliable models for HF, scaled laboratory tests and available on-site data to validate these models. The key expertise in our consortium is on modelling and simulation of HF and all partners involved pursue different computational approaches. However, we have also some partners in our consortium which focus on scaled laboratory tests and one company which can provide on-site data. The choice of the best model for HF still remains an open question and this research promises to quantify uncertainties in each model and finally provide a guideline how to choose the best model with respect to a specific output parameter. The final objective is to employ these models in order to answer some pressing questions related to environmental risks of HF practices, including 1. How does HF interact with the natural fractures that intersect the shale seam?’ 2. How does the fracture network from a previous stage of HF treatment affect the fracture network evolution in succeeding, adjacent stages? 3. What are the requirements to constrain fractures from propagating to the adjacent layers of confining rock? The exchange and training objectives are to: 4. Enhance the intersectoral and interdisciplinary training of ERs and ESRs in Computational Science, Mining Geotechnics, Geomechanics, Modeling and Simulation 5. Strengthen, quantitatively and qualitatively, the human potential in research and technology in Europe 6. Advance the scientific contribution of women researchers in this area dominated by male 7. Create synergies with other EU projects 8. Enable and support all ESRs/ERs to keep contact with international community in the sense of training and transfer of knowledge

Predicting the response of a large, complex mechanical system such as a car or an aeroplane to high frequency vibrations is a remarkably difficult task. Still, obtaining good estimates for the distribution of vibrational energy in such structures, including coupling between sub-components, damping and energy loss in form of acoustic radiation, is of great importance to engineers. An increasing demand for low vibration, low noise products to meet performance specifications and to reduce noise pollution makes any improvement in predicting vibrations response characteristics of immediate interest for industrial applications. Demand for improved virtual prototyping, as opposed to the use of expensive and time-consuming physical prototypes, is another area of application in reducing development costs and time scales. Numerical tools are often based on 'Finite Element Analysis' (FEM). While these methods work well in the low frequency regime, that is, tackling wavelengths of the order of the size of the system, they become too expensive computationally in the mid-to-high frequency regime. In particular, FEM fails to describe accurately so-called mid-frequency problems where sub-components are characterized by a wide variation of wave-lengths. While FEM is suitable for handling 'stiff' elements such as the body frame in a car, it cannot routinely capture energy transport through 'soft' components such as thin, flexible plates coupled to stiff components. A common numerical tool for predicting the vibrational contribution of short wave length components is Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA); it is, however, based on a set of restrictive assumptions which, so far, are often hard to control and generally only fulfilled in the high frequency limit and for low damping. Thus, SEA can not deliver the degree of reliability necessary to make it attractive for a wider end user community in industrial R & D departments. It is suggested here that mathematical tools from wave or quantum chaos can considerably improve the situation sketched above. Recent results by the PI Tanner show that by combining methods ranging from operator theory, dynamical systems theory and small wavelength asymptotics, SEA can be embedded into a more general theory. The new approach is based on semiclassical expansions of the full Green function in terms of rays and describing the nonlinear ray-dynamics in terms of linear operators. The resulting method captures the full correlations in the ray dynamics and has such a much improved range of validity compared to SEA. The method could revolutionise the treatment of vibrations in complex mechanical systems. Not only does it allow (i) to give quantitative bounds for the applicability of SEA (of interest to SEA users); it will also (ii) improve predictive capability in situation where SEA does not apply at a moderate computational overhead; in addition, (iii) it can be easily combined with FEM methods thus making it an ideal candidate for tackling mid-frequency problems. The approximations made are well controlled by starting from a semiclassical approach which makes it possible (iv) to systematically incorporate wave interference effects (absent in standard SEA treatments) into the method.By tackling the issues addressed above we will be able to provide improved and conceptually completely new solution methods to the engineering community based on advanced mathematical methods. The proposed research evolved out of pump-prime EPSRC funding in terms of a Springboard Fellowship. The project is thus by default of interdisciplinary nature and will be tackled jointly by the PI Tanner (Nottingham, Mathematics) and PI Mace (Southampton, ISVR, Engineering) with industrial partners from the FEM/software side (inuTech) and an engineering consulting firm (DS2L) providing input about end-user demands.