Manufacture Using Advanced Powder Processes - MAPP Conventional materials shaping and processing are hugely wasteful and energy intensive. Even with well-structured materials circulation strategies in place to recondition and recycle process scrap, the energy use, CO2 emitted and financial costs associated are ever more prohibitive and unacceptable. We can no longer accept the traditional paradigm of manufacturing where excess energy use and high levels of recycling / down cycling of expensive and resource intensive materials are viewed as inevitable and the norm and must move to a situation where 100% of the starting material is incorporated into engineering products with high confidence in the final critical properties. MAPP's vision is to deliver on the promise of powder-based manufacturing processes to provide low energy, low cost, and low waste high value manufacturing route and products to secure UK manufacturing productivity and growth. MAPP will deliver on the promise of advanced powder processing technologies through creation of new, connected, intelligent, cyber-physical manufacturing environments to achieve 'right first time' product manufacture. Achieving our vision and realising the potential of these technologies will enable us to meet our societal goals of reducing energy consumption, materials use, and CO2 emissions, and our economic goals of increasing productivity, rebalancing the UK's economy, and driving economic growth and wealth creation. We have developed a clear strategy with a collaborative and interdisciplinary research and innovation programme that focuses our collective efforts to deliver new understanding, actions and outcomes across the following themes: 1) Particulate science and innovation. Powders will become active and designed rather than passive elements in their processing. Control of surface state, surface chemistry, structure, bulk chemistry, morphologies and size will result in particles designed for process efficiency / reliability and product performance. Surface control will enable us to protect particles out of process and activate them within. Understanding the influence between particle attributes and processing will widen the limited palette of materials for both current and future manufacturing platforms. 2) Integrated process monitoring, modelling and control technologies. New approaches to powder processing will allow us to handle the inherent variability of particulates and their stochastic behaviours. Insights from advanced in-situ characterisation will enable the development of new monitoring technologies that assure quality, and coupled to modelling approaches allow optimisation and control. Data streaming and processing for adaptive and predictive real-time control will be integral in future manufacturing platforms increasing productivity and confidence. 3) Sustainable and future manufacturing technologies. Our approach will deliver certainty and integrity with final products at net or near net shape with reduced scrap, lower energy use, and lower CO2 emissions. Recoupling the materials science with the manufacturing science will allow us to realise the potential of current technologies and develop new home-grown manufacturing processes, to secure the prosperity of UK industry. MAPP's focused and collaborative research agenda covers emerging powder based manufacturing technologies: spark plasma sintering (SPS), freeze casting, inkjet printing, layer-by-layer manufacture, hot isostatic pressing (HIP), and laser, electron beam, and indirect additive manufacturing (AM). MAPP covers a wide range of engineering materials where powder processing has the clear potential to drive disruptive growth - including advanced ceramics, polymers, metals, with our initial applications in aerospace and energy sectors - but where common problems must be addressed.

Engineering Design work typically consists of reusing, configuring, and assembling of existing components, solutions and knowledge. It has been suggested that more than 75% of design activity comprises reuse of previously existing knowledge. However in spite of the importance of design reuse activities researchers have estimated that 69% of companies have no systematic approaches to preventing the "reinvention of the wheel". The major issue for supporting design re-use is providing solutions that partially re-use previous designs to satisfy new requirements. Although 3D Search technologies that aim to create "a Google for 3D shapes" have been increasing in capability and speed for over a decade they have not found widespread application and have been referred to as "a solution looking for a problem"! This project is motivated by the belief that, with a new type of user interface, 3D search could be the solutions to the design reuse problem. The novel user interface proposed can be best understood in term of an analogy to the text message systems of mobile phones. On mobile phones 'Predictive text' systems complete words or phrases by matching fragments against dictionaries or phrases used in previous messages. Similarly a 'predictive CAD' system would complete 3D models using 'shape search' technology to interactively match partial CAD features against component databases. In this way the system would prompt the users with fragments of 3D components that complete, or extend, geometry added by the user. Such a system could potential increase design productivity by making the reuse of established designs an efficient part of engineering design. Although feature based retrieval of components from databases of 3D components has been demonstrated by many researchers so far the systems reported have been relatively slow and unable to be components of an interactive design system. However recent breakthroughs in sub-graph matching algorithms have enabled the emergence of a new generation of shape retrieval algorithms, which coupled with multi-core hardware, are now fast enough to support interactive, predictive design interfaces. This proposal aims to investigate the hypothesis that a "Predictive CAD" system would allow engineers to more effectively design new components that incorporate established, or standard, functional or manufacturing geometries. This would find commercial applications within large or distributed engineering organizations. This project can be regarded as an example of "big data" being employed to increase design productivity because even small engineering companies will have many hundreds of megabytes of CAD data that a "Predictive CAD" system would effectively pattern match against.

This project aims to develop a new technology for capturing carbon into waste rock powders that are naturally formed during mining and aggregate production operations. We aim to use mechanochemical reactions, which occur during rock crushing, to permanently trap CO2 from industrial exhaust gases as a means of carbon capture. During crushing, energy is instantaneously released (as charged particles and photons) when the chemical bonds in the rock are broken. We use this mechanochemical energy to trap CO2. Our recent research, published in Nature Sustainability, showed that if you crush silica-rich rocks, such as granite and basalt, in CO2 gas instead of air, the CO2 can become permanently trapped, via a process of chemical sorption, within the crystal lattice of the crushed particles. This project will build on our early research. We will explore the effects of temperature, crushed particle size and initial rock water content on the amount of CO2 trapped per unit mass of crushed rock. We will also investigate gas stream composition. Our previous research used pure CO2: here we will crush rocks within realistic CO2-rich effluent gases from industries such as cement production, biomass power production, gas and hydrogen production from natural gas. We will evaluate the carbon savings from our technology using life cycle analysis. Finally, we will explore the potential for (1) the final rock powders to be used as a partial cement replacement product, and (2) co-production of valuable metals from the CO2-rich rock powders. This research project could have a major impact on our ability to meet net zero carbon targets by 2050. Worldwide, at least 40 billion tonnes of silicate-rich rocks are crushed every year by the mining and quarrying industries. If we can adapt current rock crushing processes to trap CO2, with very little extra energy expenditure (other than that used to transport the CO2), then this could be used to trap greenhouse gases from 'hard to decarbonise' industries. Based on our published early research findings, at least 0.4MtCO2 of thermally-stable and insoluble CO2 can be trapped for every 100Mt of saleable crushed aggregate. We estimate that, if this technology was developed and adopted worldwide, it could capture ~0.5% of global CO2 emissions, or 175MtCO2 annually: this is equivalent to the CO2 trapped by a mature forest the size of Germany.

Geological engineering encompasses a range of applications from resource extraction (hydrocarbons, geothermal heat and power, water) to waste disposal (Carbon capture and storage, wastewater disposal) and energy storage (compressed air, hydrogen). All of these technologies rely on pumps to move fluid into or out of boreholes. This prosperity partnership brings together teams that have previously worked on pumps for well stimulation with new team members involved in geomechanics and monitoring systems. Our previous work has shown that the pumps used in well stimulation are often used in very simple ways to deliver a known pressure to the top of the wellbore, leading to inefficient processes that produce a lot of noise and waste. Our partnership aims to re-engineer such systems through three linked research themes. Firstly there is evidence that pulses in pressure or dynamic variations in mean pressure could be more effective in achieving the aims of geological engineering processes. To understand the potential of pulsed pumping we need a deeper understanding of the material response to dynamic variation of the system that is being pumped: the rock mass and the borehole (casing and cement). Secondly we need to understand how to control delivery of precise pressure variations into the borehole and how to monitor these as they travel down the bore and into the rock mass. This includes the need to monitor rock mass response to develop fully 'closed loop' control systems. Finally we want to integrate the systems understanding of the pumps, the pumped system and the control systems. We will trial our new pulse propagation and monitoring system in the UK (at a site where well stimulation will not take place) and test the new monitoring system at an active well stimulation site in N. America. A series of eight linked PhD projects will explore aspects of the problems, and investigate the application of smart pumping to other sectors such as water distribution systems or transport of mining slurry. Our overall goal is to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of geological engineering through smart pumping, thereby reducing the environmental and social impact of such technologies. We have brought together a partnership of two industry and two university partners. The Weir Group and University of Strathclyde have a long history of collaboration on well stimulation pumps and other applications. The University of Edinburgh bring unique, world-leading geomechanical experimental capability to the partnership, and have previously collaborated with Strathclyde on carbon storage and compressed air energy storage. Silixa are young company specialising in optical fibres for sensing. Together this partnership will conduct the research that will underpin the development of smarter technologies in pumping and geological engineering.

Nuclear engineering has returned to the forefront of UK industrial attention with an unprecedented government economic infrastructure spend programme not seen for over 50 years. The combined life extension and new build programmes in Civil Nuclear, running in parallel with life extension and new build in submarine nuclear programmes places a significant demand on an area of engineering already dealing with a National and International skills shortage. Existing and new assets in both civil and naval sectors are important as civil nuclear power accounts for 21% of the UK's electrical generation and nuclear submarines provide the UK's independent continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent. A strategic partnership comprising Babcock International Group, BAM Nutall, Bruce Power, EDF-Energy, Kinectrics, The Weir Group and the University of Strathclyde will establish a nationally significant research programme to increase capability and multidisciplinary expertise focussed on enhanced through-life nuclear asset management. The overall aim of the partnership is two-fold. First, the drive is to create new knowledge and understanding to underpin the operational management/maintenance of existing infrastructure and to improve understanding and knowledge of lifetime and degradation processes. This will significantly increase the life of existing assets, minimise operational risk and reduce through life costs. Second, this novel knowledge can then be fed into the development of the next generation of nuclear plants and equipment, and hence translate these breakthroughs into the design and build of future nuclear assets. In doing this, the partnership will provide game changing knowledge, understanding and technology to deliver significant impact for the partners, the UK economy and global nuclear industry. Additionally it will ensure UK scientific and engineering companies remain at the forefront of global markets. The research in this programme targets low technology readiness level (TRL) advances that are required to support the ambitions of the industry partners and will deliver specific research outcomes which: - Deliver improved understanding and knowledge of lifetime and degradation processes; - Deliver a novel method or system for diagnosing or predicting degradation in plant; - Deliver novel predictive models that allow the lifetime of plant items to be extended; or - Deliver novel solutions to repairing critical plant to allow plant lifetime to be extended. The research programme and the pathway to impact will result in the whole life cycle of nuclear assets being more effectively implemented at a value higher than the sum of the individual parts. Operators will see increases in generation and reductions in costs, resulting in lower cost energy for consumers. As nuclear energy is a carbon neutral energy, investment in nuclear will help decrease CO2 emissions and global warming. The programme targets Energy Security and Efficiency, aiming to meet National Strategic Needs in the Nuclear Sector by investing in nuclear plant life extensions and efficiencies which will help increase electrical generation capacity and reduce the burden on existing electrical assets at a time when the UK faces a shortage in energy and electricity supplies in the coming years. In addition, some of the industry partners' interests span a number of sectors and the research themes in this programme are also highly relevant to other sectors including aerospace, energy and marine. Finally, an additional aim of the programme, relates to development of supply chains to deliver the next generation of technologies and components for nuclear assets. Moreover, as a number of the industrial members of the research centres are non-UK based, outputs from this research programme and subsequent products and services can be exported into international markets. This will lead to UK companies being part of foreign supply chains.