Along the well-to-wake value chain from upstream processes associated with fuels production and supply, components manufacture, and ships construction to the operation of ports and vessels, the UK domestic and international shipping produced 5.9 Mt CO2eq and 13.8 Mt CO2eq, respectively in 2017, totalling 3.4% of the UK's overall greenhouse gas emissions. The sector contributes significantly to air pollution challenges with emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide and particulate matters, harming human health and the environment particularly in coastal areas. The annual global market for maritime emission reduction technologies could reach $15 billion by 2050. This provides substantial economic opportunities for the UK. The Department for Transport's Clean Maritime Plan provides a route map for action on infrastructure, economics, regulation, and innovation that covers high technology readiness level (TRL 3-7). There is a genuine opportunity to explore fundamental research and go beyond conventional marine engineering and naval architecture and exploit the UK's world-leading cross-sectoral fundamental research expertise on hydrodynamics, fuels, combustion, electric machines and power electronics, batteries and fuel cells, energy systems, digitization, management, finance, logistics, safety engineering, etc. The proposed UK-MaRes Hub is a multidisciplinary research consortium and will conduct interdisciplinary research focussed on delivering disruptive solutions which have tangible potential to transform existing practice and reach a zero-carbon future by 2050. The challenges faced by UK maritime activity and their solutions are generally common but when deployed locally, they are bespoke due to the specifics of the port, the vessels they support, and the dependencies on their supply chains. Implementation will be heavily dependent on the local community, existing infrastructure, as well as opportunities and constraints related to the supply, distribution, storage and bunkering of alternative fuels, in decarbonising port handling facilities and cold-ironing, with the integration of renewable energy, reducing air pollution, to land-use and increased capacity and capability, and the local development of skills. The types of vessels and the cargoes handled through UK ports varies and are related to several factors, such as geographical location, regional industrial and business activity and wider transport links. Therefore, UK-MaRes Hub aims to feed into a clean maritime strategy that can adapt to place-based challenges and provide targeted technical and socio-economic interventions through a novel Co-innovation Methodology. This will bring together Research Exploration themes/work packages and Responsive Research Fund project activity into focus on port-centric scenarios and assess possibilities to innovate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, 2040 and 2050 timeframes, sharing best practice across the whole maritime ecosystem. A diverse, and inclusive Clean Maritime Network+ will ensure wider dissemination and knowledge take-up to achieve greater impact across UK ports and other maritime activity. The Network+ will have coordinated regional activity in South-West, Southern, London, Yorkshire & Lincolnshire, Midlands, North-West, North-East, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. An already established Clean Maritime Research Partnership has vibrant academic, industrial, and civic stakeholder members from across the UK. UK-MaRes Hub will establish a Clean Maritime Policy Unit to provide expert advice and quantitative evidence to enable rapid decarbonisation of the maritime sector. It will ensure that the UK-MaRes Hub is engaging with policymakers at all stages of the hub activities.

Battery electrified power is predicted to become the dominant mode of propulsion in future passenger cars. For long haul heavy duty transport challenges remain around practical range, payload and total cost. Currently there is no single economically viable decarbonised solution for heavy duty ground vehicles. Ammonia could form part of the ideal future mix, as a hydrogen energy vector or potentially through direct end use. The proposed work seeks to determine the energy and air quality impacts and potential future applications of a novel ammonia-fuelled heavy duty IC engine operating with high efficiency (c.50% brake) and zero emissions through a new fast burning combustion system. The project will evaluate potential reductions in energy demand in the 'green' ammonia production process, making use of the new green ammonia pilot plant at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories. In order to assess relative advantages and challenges, the project will undertake evidence based life cycle analysis across a spectrum of competing decarbonised powertrain technologies for long range heavy duty transport (ground, freight rail and marine).

The use of scale resolving simulations (SRS) for single phase flow applications has already shown dramatic accuracy benefits. The term SRS encompasses methods resolving a greater spectrum of turbulence e.g. large eddy simulation (LES), quasi-direct numerical simulation and hybrid methods e.g. detached eddy simulation (DES). The purpose of this work is to extend these methods for multi-phase applications. The use of SRS for single-phase turbulent flows is an area of fluids mechanics that has been widely studied for the past twenty years but SRS of multi-phase flows remains a very understudied area. The project will develop a massively parallel, high-order, fully implicit (temporal and spatial), multi-phase scale resolving methodology and perform simulations of (1) a representative aero-engine bearing chamber, (2) a representative transmission system gear and (3) a continuous chemical reactor. It will demonstrate the next generation of multi-phase high-fidelity flow simulations. We will exploit novel computing hardware through the extension and use of a state of the art fully implicit parallel library developed at the University of Oxford. The library, which enables 'future proofing' of CFD codes for modern hardware architectures, has been shown to give a 27x speedup on a GPU compared with the Intel Math Kernel Library tri-diagonal solver on a CPU. The research will be led by Dr. Richard Jefferson-Loveday, Assistant Professor in the department of Engineering at Nottingham University. It will be undertaken in collaboration with industrial partners MAHLE Powertrain, Rolls-Royce, ROMAX and GSK.

More than 80% of world energy today is provided by thermal power systems through combustion of fossil fuels. Because of their higher energy density and the extensive infrastructure for their supply, liquid fuels will remain the dominant energy source for transport for at least next few decades according to 2019 BP Energy Outlook report. In order to decarbonise the transport sector, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlights the important role that biofuels and other alternative fuels such as hydrogen and e-fuels could, in some scenarios provide over 50% of transport energy by 2050. The importance of the renewable transport fuel is also recognized by the UK Government's revised Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation published in April 2018 which sets out the targeted amount of biofuels to 12.4% to be added to regular pump fuel by 2032. In practice, there are several obstacles which hinder the application of low-carbon and zero-carbon fuels. As a zero-carbon fuel, hydrogen can be produced and used as an effective energy storage and energy carrier at solar and wind farms. But its storage and transport remain a significant challenge for its wider usage in engines due to the complexity and substantial cost of setting up multiple fuel supply infrastructure and on-board fuelling systems. Although the low-carbon renewable liquid fuels, such as ethanol and methanol produced from hydrogen and CO2, can be used with the existing fuel supply systems, the significantly lower energy density, which is about half of that of gasoline/diesel, makes them unfavourable to be directly applied in the existing engines for various applications (e.g. automotive, flying cars, light aircraft, heavy duty vehicles, etc.) with high requirements on power density. Whilst there is a drive to move towards electrification to meet the reduction of the carbon emissions, it is vital to innovate developments in advanced hybrid electrical and engine powertrain to provide additional options for future low-carbon transport. This research aims to carry out ground-breaking research on three innovative technologies covering both fuels and propulsion systems: nanobubble fuels and Nano-FUGEN system, fuel-flexible BUSDICE and DeFFEG system. The technologies either in isolation or as a hybrid have the potential to make a major contribution in addressing the challenge of decarbonising the transport sector. At first, I will explore how the nanobubble fuel (nano-fuel) concept can be used as a carrier for renewable gas fuels in liquid fuels in the form of nanobubbles. The technology can be implemented with minimal new development to the combustions engines and hence has the potential to make immediate impact on reducing CO2 emissions through better engine efficiency and increased usage of renewable energy. Secondly, a novel 2-stroke fuel-flexible BUSDICE (Boosted Uniflow Scavenged Direct Injection Combustion Engine) concept will be systematically researched and will involve development work for adapting to be used with both conventional fossil fuels and low-carbon renewable fuels (e.g. ethanol and methanol) and simultaneously achieve superior power performance and ultra-low emissions. At last, based on the developed BUSDICE concept, a Dedicated Fuel-Flexible Engine Generator (DeFFEG) will be further developed by integrating a linear generator and a gas spring chamber, therefore enabling advanced electrification and hybridisation for a range of applications, including automotive, aviation and marine industries. Overall, the proposed project is an ambitious and innovative study on the fundamentals and applications of the proposed fuel and propulsion technologies. The research not only has great potential to bring about new and fruitful academic research areas, but also will help to develop next-generation fuel and propulsion technologies towards meeting Government ambitions targets for the future low-carbon and zero-carbon transport.

Battery electrified power is predicted to become the dominant mode of propulsion in future light duty transport. For sustainable heavy duty applications challenges remain around practical range, payload and total cost. Currently there is no economically viable single solution. For commercial marine vessels the problem is compounded by long service lives, with bulk carriers, tankers and container ships the main contributors to greenhouse gases. Ammonia (NH3) has excellent potential to play a significant role as a sustainable future fuel in both retrofitted and advanced engines. However, significant uncertainties remain around safe and effective end use, with these unknowns spanning across fundamental understanding, effective application and acceptance. This multi-disciplinary programme seeks to overcome the key related technical, economic and social unknowns through flexible, multidisciplinary research set around disruptive NH3 engine concepts capable of high thermal efficiency and ultra low NOx. The goal is to accelerate understanding, technologies and ultimately policies which are appropriately scaled and "right first time".