This Fellowship will enable the rigorous study of a fragile structural form that has long left the comfortable confines of the laboratory scale and is increasingly critical to our renewable energy independence. This Fellowship will, for the first ever time: develop open-source solvers for the high-performance simulation of structural systems with sharply nonlinear behaviour suffering from numerical deterioration in partnership with the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC); develop protocols for the digital twinning of massive shell structures where the quality of the twinned midsurface is paramount and sub-mm geometric features can be critical, in partnership with reality capture specialists Leica Geosystems (LGS); gather the first terabyte-sized datasets of digital twin inputs representing state-of-the-art offshore wind support structures based on unprecedented access to facilities planned for construction starting in 2025 granted by project partners Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (SGRE), ScottishPower Renewables (SPR) and COWI; complete the scientific understanding of the nonlinear response of very long tubular structural forms prone to ovalisation phenomena; generate extensive datasets of synthetic buckling resistances of digitally-twinned shells; calibrate actual safety margins of current and future planned offshore wind support structures and disseminate this within the international Eurocode design framework; ('Plus') found a permanent indexed data journal to accumulate empirical and numerical dataset pairs for the wider computational engineering community to validate simulations used in research and safety-critical design. The open-source software development will push the boundaries of computational structural engineering and support an emerging research culture increasingly employing digital twinning. The financial benefits of quantifying actual safety margins of current and future-scale offshore wind support structures are significant: a single modern tower saved from failure saves ~£2M, while even a ~10% reduction in steel saves ~£10M across a 100-tower offshore installation (assuming ~£1k / tonne for structural steel, not including carbon cost).

Our Vision is for climate resilient, net zero development of the transport system to be guided by systems analysis. When this vision is realised, decision-makers will have access to (and visualisation of) data that tells them how transport is performing against resilience, decarbonisation, and other objectives, now and in the future. We will deliver them systems models that will help to pinpoint vulnerabilities and quantify the risks of failure. This will enable them to perform 'what-if' analysis of proposed investments and to stress-test scenarios for the major uncertainties that will determine the performance of future transport systems, such as population growth, new materials and technologies and climate change. Our ambition is to deliver co-created research that plots viable pathways and solutions for delivering a resilient, net-zero transport system that works for people and communities by 2050. DARe will be the go-to Hub because we will engage widely and proactively, and provide the evidence, guidance and tools to decision-makers that will enable them to prioritise early interventions and investments. . Our research programme will take a system-of-systems led approach to transport which recognises and addresses the challenges at the three, distinct but critically interlinked, scales of national, regional and local. It will address the interwoven challenges of resilience and net zero, for both existing and new transport infrastructures, and identify and provide solutions for new vulnerabilities that may occur because of the net zero transition, including critical interdependencies with digital and power infrastructures. It will demonstrate the benefits and opportunities that come from reimagining and rethinking how our transport systems deliver mobility to both people and the goods and services our economy relies on, and will offer insight on how governance and policy can enable and drive these changes. We have shaped our research programme in consultation with our multiple civic partners in North East and North West England, Northumberland, Cambridgeshire & Heartland and Scotland as well as our strong cohort of additional partners. DARe will build on this by opening the partnership to all and proactively engage in a programme of co-creation events during the first nine months to jointly define scenarios and storylines leading us towards addressing the dual challenge of decarbonising our local regional and national transport infrastructures whilst increasing their resilience and adaptability in a context of climate change. The role and participation of the wider research community via the DARe Flexible Fund will be instrumental in delivering this. The DARe work programme comprises five integrated work packages (WPs), four focussed research activities plus a management WP. WP1 delivers the co-created transport futures storylines which shape the research activities of the hub and develops the storylines to stress-test solutions across the three spatial scales, contextualised by the systems-of-systems interactions between transport-power-digital critical infrastructures. WP2 provides a new, transferable open-source modelling framework that will be co-developed with and made available to the wider community as a legacy of DARe. WP3 will address the physical implications for infrastructure assets and how their climate-perturbed performance will impact whole-life management. WP4 will provide insights into the wider implications and real-world impacts of the storylines when considering the policy, socio-economic, behavioural and land use planning aspects of the hub. WP0 will be dedicated to hub management, governance and engagement.

Local and global consequences of climate change (enhanced urban heat islands, worsening environmental conditions) affect most of the world's urban population, but only recently have cities been represented, albeit crudely, in weather forecast models. To manage and develop sustainable, resilient and healthy cities requires improved forecasting and observations that cross neighbourhood-influenced scales which the next generation weather forecast models need to resolve. ASSURE addresses the critical issue of which processes need to be parameterised, and which resolved, to capture urban heterogeneity in space and time. We will advance understanding to develop new approaches and parameterisations for larger-scale urban meteorological and dispersion models by combining the results of field observations, high-resolution numerical simulations and wind tunnel experiments. Field work and modelling will focus on Bristol, as its physical geography provides suitably high levels of complexity and allows whole-city approaches. With mid-sized cities being large sources of greenhouse gases, and where large numbers of people live, it is critical agencies can provide predictions of weather and climate variability across cities of this scale as they need this information to manage and provide their services. ASSURE will include idealised simulations and theoretical analyses to ensure generic applicability. The ASSURE objectives are: * To understand how sources of urban heterogeneity (physical setting, layout of buildings and neighbourhoods, human activities) combine to influence the urban atmosphere in space and time. * To quantify effects of urban heterogeneity at different scales (street to neighbourhood, to city and beyond) on flow, temperature, moisture and air quality controlling processes and to determine how these processes interact. * To develop a theoretical framework that captures key processes and feedbacks with reduced complexity to aid mesoscale and larger model parameterisations. * To inform the development priorities of current weather and climate models that have meso-scale capabilities and are used in decision-making processes (e.g. integrated urban services). The ASSURE high-fidelity simulations and carefully designed experiments will allow us to explore implications of urban heterogeneity in isolated and combined configurations; interpret and integrate field observations (e.g. 3D meteorological and city-scale tracer dispersion experiments); integrate different approaches to understand the magnitude, source, and geographical extent of uncertainties in process models at different scales; synthesize the new knowledge to conduct theoretical analyses; develop algorithms reflecting this analysis. Novel in ASSURE are simulations resolving street to city-scale features that are linked to mesoscale models; field observations capturing vertical and horizontal variations in the urban boundary- and canopy-layers, including novel multi-source gas tracer experiments; and wind tunnel simulations across atmospheric stabilities and model resolution. New insights will be gained on the role of variations in the building morphology (or form), local topography, and human activities (e.g. waste heat, and AQ emissions). ASSURE will produce detailed datasets; in-depth understanding across the scale of atmospheric processes involved; high-fidelity multiscale urban modelling tools; theoretical models taking account of multiscale effects; improved assessment of current meso-scale model skill and the data used by practitioners to explore future urban scenarios as city form and function change. We will work with local and international organisations and companies to ensure the project benefits a broad range of society. They include: Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, CERC, COWI, ECMWF, Met Office, Delft University of Technology, Stanford University, University Hannover, RWDI, Surrey Sensors and UKCRIC.

Digital twins are a fusion of digital technologies considered by many leading advocates to be revolutionary in nature. Digital twins offer exciting new possibilities across a wide range of sectors from health, environment, transport, manufacturing, defence, and infrastructure. By connecting the virtual and physical worlds (e.g. cyber-physcial), digital twins are able to better support decisions, extend operational lives, and introduce multiple other efficiencies and benefits. As a result, digital twins have been identified by government, professional bodies and industry, as a key technology to help address many of the societal challenges we face. To date, digital twin (DT) innovation has been strongly driven by industry practitioners and commercial innovators. As would be expected with any early-adoption approach, projects have been bespoke & often isolated, and so there is a need for research to increase access, lower entry costs and develop interconnectivity. Furthermore, there are several major gaps in underpinning academic research relating to DT. The academic push has been significantly lagging behind the industry pull. As a result, there is an urgent need for a network that will fill gaps in the underpinning research for topics such as; uncertainty, interoperability, scaling, governance & societal effects. In terms of existing networking activities, there are several industry-led user groups and domain-specific consortia. However, there has never been a dedicated academic-led DT network that brings together academic research teams across the entire remit of UKRI with user-led groups. DTNet+ will address this gap with a consortium which has both sufficient breadth and depth to deliver transformative change.