This proposal is concerned with the renewal of the Salford IMRC which was initially established in January 2002. This proposal will extent the life of the Salford Centre for Research and Innovation (SCRI) in the built and human environment, until 2011 and further increase the impact that the centre has created in the first five years of its lifecycle. The rolling research agenda and evolving vision of the Centre has been very well received by the industrial and academic circles, as it has been made explicit by the international assessment panels and this renewal aims to firmly establish the world class status of the centre and increase the performance of UK Plc. The centre brings together significant expertise from three research institutes within the university of Salford and aims to continue its collaboration with more that 60 partners in the industrial and academic communities internationally.

The InterCityAir project will develop a wireless sensor for the measurement of air pollution. The sensor will be integrated into urban traffic management systems in the City of Chester to reduce levels of toxic gases to which the public are being exposed. InterCityAir will directly address the following key challenges of this call, namely: The use of environmental and social data to address urban challenges, the creation of a new value proposition through integration of datasets, and an improvement in the monitoring of the urban environment through the development and deployment of an intelligent sensor system. InterCityAir will develop an air quality (AQ) sensing platform that can be integrated with the transport management systems of Cheshire West and Chester Council (CWAC). C-Tech will develop a wireless sensing unit comprising commercial sensors that could be deployed as a stand-alone system or city-wide network at low cost for remote real-time monitoring of air quality. The sensing units will be wireless enabled and suitable for road-side AQ monitoring with a view to be adapted for on-board vehicle monitoring of AQ. This project will establish the feasibility of linking the C-Tech sensing unit with existing traffic count data and the traffic signalling system to alleviate traffic build-up and associated pollution hotspots. The University of Chester (UOC) will deploy air quality instrumentation alongside the CWAC real-time nitrogen oxides (NOx) monitoring site in the Air Quality Management Area (AQMA) on the Boughton gyratory to gather comprehensive baseline data to understand fully the performance of the sensor package in the complex urban atmosphere. This site in the AQMA will be used as a demonstration site for the sensing platform developed by C-Tech.