In the UK the 600,000 km long underground sewer system (including private sewers) is ageing and poorly monitored. In continental Europe, the total value of the sewer assets amounts to 2 trillion Euros. The US EPA estimates that sewer collection systems in the USA have a total replacement value between $1 and $2 trillion. In China alone 40,000 km of new sewer pipes are laid every year. The system is subject to increasing capacity demands because of increased urbanisation and climate change. OFWAT (UK) and similar regulatory bodies in the developed countries impose a legal duty on water utilities to maintain the conditions of their sewer systems and to reduce the risk of flooding incidents. Consequently, monitoring pipes for obstructions and defects remediation forms an important part of an effective management programme to reduce sewer flooding and optimise the operational and maintenance costs. Existing sewer survey methods are limited to the interpretation of CCTV and LightLine images which are relatively slow and require a mobile trolley with camera to traverse through individual sewer pipes. Other existing inspection solutions rely on a limited number of flow metering devices (spot meters) which are installed sparsely across the sewer network. As a result, there are clear indications that less than 2% of the UK network is surveyed every 5 years and that a considerable number of flooding incidents are either unreported or observed with a considerable delay. This prevents the water utilities from developing a proactive maintenance programme which would enable them to achieve zero-failures in terms of sewer flooding. The project proposed here is formulated to develop new science which underpins the emerging fibre-optic sensing technology platform which can be laid with a robot in the invert of a sewer pipe to sense the flow conditions and continuously monitor pipe deterioration pervasively and to respond to events proactively. Theoretical, numerical modelling and extensive laboratory work will be carried out to understand the fluid-structure interactions between the turbulent flow and turbulence-induced vibration in the fibre cable containment system. The optical signals will be studied, numerically predicted and theoretically explained. New signal processing and pattern recognition algorithms will be developed to link these optical signals to key flow characteristics and to the change in any change structural integrity of the pipe. In addition, field measurements and validation will be carried out with support the lead commercial partner, nuron Ltd, using the new fibre-optic cable system. A key outcome of this work will be: (i) new theoretical understanding how this technology works and be developed towards a much higher technology readiness level; (ii) new, user-friendly software which will incorporate the major theoretical findings and post-processing algorithms that convert the optical signal to the flow characteristics measured distributively along the fibre-optic cable length and understood by the end-user. The proposal is timely because it will contribute significantly to the need for us to better understand the hydraulic behaviour and conditions of our buried infrastructure in real time and at an unprecedented spatial resolution. The new sensor technology will also enable new theoretical foundations to be developed in the areas of hydraulics, wave propagation, structural health/condition monifoting and computational fluid dynamics.

Today, many advanced countries are positioning themselves to have Sustainable Development (SD) at the heart of their developmental policies. Applying SD principals to a large community or perhaps a city is to be commended. In China, the development of such a city is becoming a reality and an integrated master planning for the world's first sustainable city / Dongtan - was launched recently. Dongtan is situated on Chongming Island, the third largest island in China, near Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze River. The island currently consists of a large area of mostly agricultural land. The Shanghai Municipal Government is planning to turn Chongming Island into an eco-island, and Dongtan as a model eco-friendly area. At three quarters the size of Manhattan, Dongtan will be developed on 630 hectares of land as a sustainable city to attract a range of commercial and leisure investments. A programme to develop such a sustainable city presents an unsurpassed opportunity to study and capture all aspects of the development including: the consultation, planning and design stages and the implementation phases of such a project. A recent workshop (Nov 2006) organised by EPSRC, Arup and their Chinese partners has resulted in the formation of specific networks that aim to begin research studies, information capture processes and establish appropriate research programmes that will achieve the most sustainable approaches for the Dongtan eco city development. The three networks which aim to learn from the Dongtan experience, allow and facilitate knowledge networking between Chinese and UK collaborators are as follows: (a) City History and Multi-scale Spatial Master-planning, (b) Network to Investigate Sustainable Economic and Ecological models of Peripheral Urban and (c) Sustainable Urban Systems to Transfer Achievable Implementation Network Resources and Infrastructure Systems Development. In addition to the networks, the workshop also established a Coordination Framework which is independent of the four networks. The main purpose of the coordinating framework is to draw and tie the identified networks together. This proposal deals mainly with the establishment of the coordinating framework group , the objectives and activities of the framework and its funding profile.

The CDT proposal 'Fuel Cells and their Fuels - Clean Power for the 21st Century' is a focused and structured programme to train >52 students within 9 years in basic principles of the subject and guide them in conducting their PhD theses. This initiative answers the need for developing the human resources well before the demand for trained and experienced engineering and scientific staff begins to strongly increase towards the end of this decade. Market introduction of fuel cell products is expected from 2015 and the requirement for effort in developing robust and cost effective products will grow in parallel with market entry. The consortium consists of the Universities of Birmingham (lead), Nottingham, Loughborough, Imperial College and University College of London. Ulster University is added as a partner in developing teaching modules. The six Centre directors and the 60+ supervisor group have an excellent background of scientific and teaching expertise and are well established in national and international projects and Fuel Cell, Hydrogen and other fuel processing research and development. The Centre programme consists of seven compulsory taught modules worth 70 credit points, covering the four basic introduction modules to Fuel Cell and Hydrogen technologies and one on Safety issues, plus two business-oriented modules which were designed according to suggestions from industry partners. Further - optional - modules worth 50 credits cover the more specialised aspects of Fuel Cell and fuel processing technologies, but also include socio-economic topics and further modules on business skills that are invaluable in preparing students for their careers in industry. The programme covers the following topics out of which the individual students will select their area of specialisation: - electrochemistry, modelling, catalysis; - materials and components for low temperature fuel cells (PEFC, 80 and 120 -130 degC), and for high temperature fuel cells (SOFC) operating at 500 to 800 degC; - design, components, optimisation and control for low and high temperature fuel cell systems; including direct use of hydrocarbons in fuel cells, fuel processing and handling of fuel impurities; integration of hydrogen systems including hybrid fuel-cell-battery and gas turbine systems; optimisation, control design and modelling; integration of renewable energies into energy systems using hydrogen as a stabilising vector; - hydrogen production from fossil fuels and carbon-neutral feedstock, biological processes, and by photochemistry; hydrogen storage, and purification; development of low and high temperature electrolysers; - analysis of degradation phenomena at various scales (nano-scale in functional layers up to systems level), including the development of accelerated testing procedures; - socio-economic and cross-cutting issues: public health, public acceptance, economics, market introduction; system studies on the benefits of FCH technologies to national and international energy supply. The training programme can build on the vast investments made by the participating universities in the past and facilitated by EPSRC, EU, industry and private funds. The laboratory infrastructure is up to date and fully enables the work of the student cohort. Industry funding is used to complement the EPSRC funding and add studentships on top of the envisaged 52 placements. The Centre will emphasise the importance of networking and exchange of information across the scientific and engineering field and thus interacts strongly with the EPSRC-SUPERGEN Hub in Fuel Cells and Hydrogen, thus integrating the other UK universities active in this research area, and also encourage exchanges with other European and international training initiatives. The modules will be accessible to professionals from the interacting industry in order to foster exchange of students with their peers in industry.

Flooding is the deadliest and most costly natural hazard on the planet, affecting societies across the globe. Nearly one billion people are exposed to the risk of flooding in their lifetimes and around 300 million are impacted by floods in any given year. The impacts on individuals and societies are extreme: each year there are over 6,000 fatalities and economic losses exceed US$60 billion. These problems will become much worse in the future. There is now clear consensus that climate change will, in many parts of the globe, cause substantial increases in the frequency of occurrence of extreme rainfall events, which in turn will generate increases in peak flood flows and therefore flood vast areas of land. Meanwhile, societal exposure to this hazard is compounded still further as a result of population growth and encroachment of people and key infrastructure onto floodplains. Faced with this pressing challenge, reliable tools are required to predict how flood hazard and exposure will change in the future. Existing state-of-the-art Global Flood Models (GFMs) are used to simulate the probability of flooding across the Earth, but unfortunately they are highly constrained by two fundamental limitations. First, current GFMs represent the topography and roughness of river channels and floodplains in highly simplified ways, and their relatively low resolution inadequately represents the natural connectivity between channels and floodplains. This restricts severely their ability to predict flood inundation extent and frequency, how it varies in space, and how it depends on flood magnitude. The second limitation is that current GFMs treat rivers and their floodplains essentially as 'static pipes' that remain unchanged over time. In reality, river channels evolve through processes of erosion and sedimentation, driven by the impacts of diverse environmental changes (e.g., climate and land use change, dam construction), and leading to changes in channel flow conveyance capacity and floodplain connectivity. Until GFMs are able to account for these changes they will remain fundamentally unsuitable for predicting the evolution of future flood hazard, understanding its underlying causes, or quantifying associated uncertainties. To address these issues we will develop an entirely new generation of Global Flood Models by: (i) using Big Data sets and novel methods to enhance substantially their representation of channel and floodplain morphology and roughness, thereby making GFMs more morphologically aware; (ii) including new approaches to representing the evolution of channel morphology and channel-floodplain connectivity; and (iii) combining these developments with tools for projecting changes in catchment flow and sediment supply regimes over the 21st century. These advances will enable us to deliver new understanding on how the feedbacks between climate, hydrology, and channel morphodynamics drive changes in flood conveyance and future flooding. Moreover, we will also connect our next generation GFM with innovative population models that are based on the integration of satellite, survey, cell phone and census data. We will apply the coupled model system under a range of future climate, environmental and societal change scenarios, enabling us to fully interrogate and assess the extent to which people are exposed, and dynamically respond, to evolving flood hazard and risk. Overall, the project will deliver a fundamental change in the quantification, mapping and prediction of the interactions between channel-floodplain morphology and connectivity, and flood hazard across the world's river basins. We will share models and data on open source platforms. Project outcomes will be embedded with scientists, global numerical modelling groups, policy-makers, humanitarian agencies, river basin stakeholders, communities prone to regular or extreme flooding, the general public and school children.

This project addresses how environmental change affects the movement of sediment through rivers and into our oceans. Understanding the movement of suspended sediment is important because it is a vector for nutrients and pollutants, and because sediment also creates floodplains and nourishes deltas and beaches, affording resilience to coastal zones. To develop our understanding of sediment flows, we will quantify recent variations (1985-present) in sediment loads for every river on the planet with a width greater than 90 metres. We will also project how these river sediment loads will change into the future. These goals have not previously been possible to achieve because direct measurements of sediment transport through rivers have only ever been made on very few (<10% globally) rivers. We are proposing to avoid this difficulty by using a 35+ years of archive of freely available satellite imagery. Specifically, we will use the cloud-based Google Earth Engine to automatically analyse each satellite image for its surface reflectance, which will enable us to estimate the concentration of sediment suspended near the surface of rivers. In conjunction with other methods that characterise the flow and the mixing of suspended sediment through the water column, these new estimates of surface Suspended Sediment Concentration (SSC) will be used to calculate the total movement of suspended sediment through rivers. We then analyse our new database (which, with a five orders of magnitude gain in spatial resolution relative to the current state-of-the-art, will be unprecedented in its size and global coverage) of suspended sediment transport using novel Machine Learning techniques, within a Bayesian Network framework. This analysis will allow us to link our estimates of sediment transport to their environmental controls (such as climate, geology, damming, terrain), with the scale of the empirical analysis enabling a step-change to be obtained in our understanding of the factors driving sediment movement through the world's rivers. In turn, this will allow us to build a reliable model of sediment movement, which we will apply to provide a comprehensive set of future projections of sediment movement across Earth to the oceans. Such future projections are vital because the Earth's surface is undergoing a phase of unprecedented change (e.g., through climate change, damming, deforestation, urbanisation, etc) that will likely drive large transitions in sediment flux, with major and wide reaching potential impacts on coastal and delta systems and populations. Importantly, we will not just quantify the scale and trajectories of change, but we will also identify how the relative contributions of anthropogenic, climatic and land cover processes drive these shifts into the future. This will allow us to address fundamental science questions relating to the movement of sediment through Earth's rivers to our oceans, such as: 1. What is the total contemporary sediment flux from the continents to the oceans, and how does this total vary spatially and seasonally? 2. What is the relative influence of climate, land use and anthropogenic activities in governing suspended sediment flux and how have these roles changed? 3. How do physiographic characteristics (area, relief, connectivity, etc.) amplify or dampen sediment flux response to external (climate, land use, damming, etc) drivers of change and thus condition the overall response, evolution and trajectory of sediment flux in different parts of the world? 4. To what extent is the flux of sediment driven by extreme runoff generating events (e.g. Tropical Cyclones) versus more common, lower magnitude events? How will projected changes in storm frequency and magnitude affect the world's sediment fluxes in the future? 5. How will the global flux of sediment to the oceans change over the course of the 21st century under a range of plausible future environmental change scenarios?