One of the main challenges our society faces is the dwindling level of oil reserves which we not only depend upon for transport fuels, but also plastics, lubricants and a wide range of petrochemicals. This application seeks to provide an answer through synthetic biology: making organisms produce "oil". Although the production of oil is mainly a biogenic process, the geochemical conversion of biological matter to oil occurs over thousands of years. Solutions that seek to reduce our dependency on fossil oil are therefore urgently needed. The direct production of hydrocarbon compounds by living organisms, bypassing the geochemical conversion of organic matter into oil, is an attractive process, but is unfortunately not part of the "mainstream" repertoire of biochemical reactions that would be required to make this an attractive sustainable alternative. Indeed, minor pathways or side-reactions resulting in the production of hydrocarbons such as alkenes or alkanes have only recently been documented. Unfortunately, these are not present in any organism to the scale and/or specificity that would support industrial application, let alone provide a valid alternative to fossil oil. However, the application of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering to modify these pathways is likely to result in innovative advances in this area. To meet these challenges, we will combine state-of-the-art enzymology and laboratory evolution techniques with synthetic biology. The first challenge is enzymatic hydrocarbon production, a process that often starts with fatty acids. The enzymes involved in converting fatty acids to hydrocarbons have only very recently been identified and many remain unstudied. Furthermore, their properties (substrate and product specificity, stability and rate) are unlikely to support an industrial scale process. We will investigate the use of a wide range of enzymes using structure-based rational engineering and laboratory evolution, in order to create a comprehensive toolkit of catalysts that we will exploit for hydrocarbon production. Ultimately, we will attempt to integrate these with various components into a bacterial strain which can convert renewables into hydrocarbons, preferentially excreted to the outside environment, creating a sustainable process. This ambitious programme addresses an urgent industrial need for reducing our dependency on fossil oil. Through enzyme design and development of new pathways, it will generate "oil"-producing organisms, hence bypassing the need to drastically adapt oil-dependent processes while reducing the associated carbon footprint. Our project will focuses in particular on production of linear alpha-olefins, a high value, industrially crucial intermediate class of hydrocarbons that are key chemical intermediates in a variety of applications, such as flexible packaging, rigid packaging and pipes, synthetic lubricants used in passenger car, heavy duty motor and gear oils, surfactants, detergents, lubricant additives and paper sizing. At present, no "green" alpha-olefin production process is available, a situation which this application seeks to change.

The 12 May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, had a magnitude of 7.9 and devastated a large area of western China. The earthquake occurred beneath some of the steepest and most rugged mountains in the world, the Longmen Shan or Dragon's Gate Mountains. This range, steeper than the Himalaya, forms the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, the 5 km high collision zone between India and Eurasia. The origin of the Longmen Shan are somewhat mysterious, because the region shows relatively little sign of tectonic activity and has had very few historical earthquakes. Despite this quiescence, previous work by the PI and Co-I has shown that the faults in the Longmen Shan have been active in the geologically-recent past, with earthquakes in the last 10000 years. Two long faults in particular, the Beichuan and Pengguan faults, run almost the entire length of the Longmen Shan and show clear evidence of earthquakes during the last few thousands, and in some cases hundreds, of years. The rates of slip vary between fractions of mm per year to possibly many mm per year. The steep topography and high rainfall in the region, however, mean that the evidence of these past earthquakes is quickly lost through erosion, and so these estimates of slip rates and even the exact locations of the faults are very uncertain. The 12 May earthquake provides an unprecedented opportunity to view the geometry and sense of slip on the underlying faults, and to see the relationships between the short-term and long-term patterns of deformation that have created the Longmen Shan. In the proposed research, we will map the pattern of surface slip that occurred in the earthquake and measure the orientation and amount of slip at different points along the rupture zone. The earthquake appears to have occurred on the Beichuan fault, but the pattern of slip at the surface is complicated and it may be that more than one fault was involved in the earthquake. Untangling the details of such complexity is a good way of understanding the geometrical relationships between faults below the surface, and the way in which the faults have interacted and evolved over time. The distribution of slip in the earthquake can be directly compared to the pattern of damage to infrastructure and the occurrence of earthquake-triggered landslides. It can also be used to check and calibrate rapid, remote methods of estimating earthquake size, such as seismological or satellite-based remote sensing techniques.

This proposal seeks funding for a three year research programme into the use of waves which are guided by structural features for the detection of defects, such as cracks or corrosion, in or near the features. The idea is supported by practical observations that a butt weld between two plates has a significant guiding effect, clearly tending to retain the energy of the fundamental extensional wave in and near the weld. The work will include the development of a modelling capability to study and understand the nature of guided waves in welds and other structural features, followed by a study of the application of the model to butt welds and other realistic features of interest to the industrial partners. The proposal is being submitted within the UK Research Centre in NDE (RCNDE) to the targeted research programme, the funding for which is earmarked by EPSRC for industrially driven research.

The UK, together with the international community, is acutely aware of the problems arising from the unsustainable use of fossil fuels, and is increasingly focusing on the development of zero-carbon emission fuels, particularly hydrogen, using renewable energy sources. Of the renewable energy sources under consideration, solar energy is the most abundant and, if harvested efficiently, is capable of meeting global energy needs for the foreseeable future. It is estimated that solar power incident on the earth is 178,000 TW, approximately 13,500 times greater than the total global power demand (or burn rate) in 2000 (13 TW) and 6400 times greater than recent forecasts of the power demand for 2020 (28 TW). Much solar energy research is focused on its direct conversion to electricity in photovoltaic devices, or on its direct conversion to heat in solar thermal devices. A major barrier to all these 'conventional' routes is their prohibitive cost. Here, we propose to exploit low temperature natural biological and photocatalytic processes to develop alternative, and cost effective, methods for harvesting solar energy to produce renewable hydrogen fuels directly, and to explore how these could be embedded within novel, integrated energy production systems, incorporating fuel cell and hydrogen storage technology.The successful scale-up of these solar energy-driven renewable hydrogen generation processes would transform the supply of carbon-less fuel and make an enormous impact on the viability of hydrogen as an energy carrier. It will convert the potential to produce hydrogen in a carbon-free, renewable way into a process reality, and is an essential step on the route to fully exploiting fuel cell technology. It will position the UK as a world leader in one of the very few solutions to a truly sustainable energy future. As such, the impact is wide ranging, scientifically, technologically and commercially.

Accurate corrosion depth mapping in inaccessible areas is a problem of major importance across a wide spectrum of industries. While several thickness gauging techniques are available, they are only applicable when the area to be inspected is directly accessible. In fact, standard gauging methods require a probing sensor to be scanned over the area where corrosion damage is expected. However, this is not always possible as access can be limited due to the presence of other structural members. As an example, determination of the depth of corrosion at supports of pipelines is a major issue in the petrochemical industry. At present the only reliable way to determine the corrosion depth accurately is to lift the pipe from the support and to use standard methods, thus resulting in a very costly and potentially hazardous inspection procedure. Here, we propose a tomographic approach similar to X-ray CT. However, instead of using ionizing radiation we employ guided ultrasonic waves that can be transmitted across the inspection area from a remote and accessible transducer location. While the interaction of photons with matter can be described by simple ray models in X-ray CT, scattering, diffraction and refraction phenomena characterise the encoding of mechanical property information in guided wave signals. These phenomena add much complexity to the problem of retrieving thickness maps in GWT and represent the main challenge of this proposal. Therefore, at a fundamental level this programme aims at developing a general approach to GWT that can address this complexity borrowing ideas developed in geophysical exploration and medical diagnostics. From a more applied perspective, we propose to develop a field deployable prototype for mapping corrosion at supports which will serve the twofold purpose of maintaining the research focussed on practical problems and of facilitating the translation of the proposed technology to industry. Moreover, the prototype will have a flexible design that will allow its application to corrosion mapping problems in inaccessible areas other than pipe supports to ensure that the proposed technology will have an impact across a wide spectrum of industries. This proposal is being submitted within the UK Research Centre in NDE to the targeted research programme, the funding for which is earmarked by EPSRC for industrially driven NDE research. It is supported by Shell and Petrobras who are contributing 90k cash as well as in-kind contributions to the project.