This proposal sets out the terms for the continuation funding for the IMRC at Imperial College. All objectives, research plans and beneficiaries information has previously been approved though the 3rd year review of the existing Centre.

Materials characterisation is critical to the understanding of key processes in a range of functional and structural materials that have applications across several industrial sectors. These sectors include strategic priorities such as discovery of functional materials, energy storage and conversion and materials manufacturing, and healthcare. Materials characterisation is increasing in complexity, driven by a need to understand how materials properties evolve in operando, over their full lifetimes and over all levels of their hierarchy to predict their ultimate performance. The new generation of materials characterisation techniques will require: 1. Greater spatial and chemical resolution; 2. Correlated information that bridges nano- and centimeter -length scales, to relate the nanoscale chemistry and structure of interest to their intrinsically multi-scale surroundings, and 3. Temporal information about the kinetics of materials behaviour in extreme environments. The CDT will train students in a range of complementary techniques, ensuring that they have the breadth and depth of knowledge to make informed choices when considering key characterisation challenges. Our CDT will use an integrated training approach, to ensure that the technical content is well aligned with the research objectives of each student. This training in specific research needs will be informed by our industry partners and will reflect the suite of research projects that the students will undertake. Our portfolio of research projects will provide an innovative and ambitious research and training experience that will enhance the UK's long-term capabilities across high value industrial sectors. Additionally, our students will receive training in a range of topics that will support their research progress including in science communication, research ethics, career development planning and data science. These additional courses will be distributed throughout the 4-year PhD programme and will ensure that a cohesive training plan is in place for each student, supported by cohort mentors. Each student graduating from the CDT-ACM will leave will a through understanding of the key challenges presented by materials characterisation problems, and have the tools to provide creative solutions to these. They will have first hand experience of collaborating with industry partners and will be well placed to address the strategic needs of the UK Industrial Strategy. Our training will be developed in collaboration with leading partner organisations, and include international collaboration with the AMBER centre, a Science Foundation Ireland centre, as well as national facilities such as Diamond Light Source. Innovative on-line and remote instrument access will be developed that will enable both UK and Irish cohorts to interact seamlessly. Industry partners will be closely involved in designing and delivering training activities including at summer schools, and will include entrepreneurship activities. Overall the 70 students that will be trained over the lifetime of the CDT will receive excellent tuition and research training at two world leading institutions with unique characterisation abilities.

In 2003 BP installed a dense array of seimic recording equipment on the sea bottom above the Vallhall oil field in the North Sea. Nearly 2500 state-of-the-art seismometers were attached to 120 km of cables that cover a 45 square km area and are connected to a recording platform. The installation is the first of its kind anywhere in the world and cost nearly US$45million. Such permanent monitoring allows the acquisition of ship-borne seismic surveys at regular intervals in time (so-called 4D seismics) for the life of the field (hence the name Life of Field Seismic or LoFS). Because the surveys are identical each time the data can be used to very accurately monitor changes in the reservoir, for example, the migration of oil due to production. The multicomponent sensors can also be used to record less conventional data. For example, in this part of the North Sea shear-waves are much better than the conventional first arriving P-waves at imaging through the cloud of gas that lies above the reservoir. This new way of monitoring an oil field has dramatically improved reservoir management and productivity, and reduce costs in the long term. The sensors are continuously recording, even when active-source (airguns) ship surveys are not being conducted. Thus there is great untapped potential in using these data to study small earthquakes in the subsurface. Such microseismic events are useful because they provide information about regional tectonics and production related forces. They provide information about fault locations and fluid migration, knowledge of which are of great importance to production. Furthermore, such stress releases can lead to well failure (borehole breakout), which costs the industry billions of pounds each year and can be quite dangerous. We are proposing a study of these micro-earthquakes by developing sophisticated imaging techniques that will use the sensors like eyes that can look in different directions into the Earth. Whilst these earthquakes a very small (they release roughly the same amount of energy as breaking a pencil) they can be accurately located and studied because of the redundancies afforded by such an immense amount of data. We can use standard techniques from conventional earthquake seismology to infer the orientation of fault planes and the stress field in the reservoir. A further synergy comes from the detailed information about the field that BP has at hand (e.g., velocity structure). We will work closely with BP staff and will be allowed to use their massive computing clusters to process the data. We are one of the very first organisations being allowed to look at this exciting dataset and the project will produce high-profile results. This is a unique and timely opportunity.

This Centre for Doctoral training in Industrially Focused Mathematical Modelling will train the next generation of applied mathematicians to fill critical roles in industry and academia. Complex industrial problems can often be addressed, understood, and mitigated by applying modern quantitative methods. To effectively and efficiently apply these techniques requires talented mathematicians with well-practised problem-solving skills. They need to have a very strong grasp of the mathematical approaches that might need to be brought to bear, have a breadth of understanding of how to convert complex practical problems into relevant abstract mathematical forms, have knowledge and skills to solve the resulting mathematical problems efficiently and accurately, and have a wide experience of how to communicate and interact in a multidisciplinary environment. This CDT has been designed by academics in close collaboration with industrialists from many different sectors. Our 35 current CDT industrial partners cover the sectors of: consumer products (Sharp), defence (Selex, Thales), communications (BT, Vodafone), energy (Amec, BP, Camlin, Culham, DuPont, GE Energy, Infineum, Schlumberger x2, VerdErg), filtration (Pall Corp), finance (HSBC, Lloyds TSB), food and beverage (Nestle, Mondelez), healthcare (e-therapeutics, Lein Applied Diagnostics, Oxford Instruments, Siemens, Solitonik), manufacturing (Elkem, Saint Gobain), retail (dunnhumby), and software (Amazon, cd-adapco, IBM, NAG, NVIDIA), along with two consultancy companies (PA Consulting, Tessella) and we are in active discussion with other companies to grow our partner base. Our partners have five key roles: (i) they help guide and steer the centre by participating in an Industrial Engagement Committee, (ii) they deliver a substantial elements of the training and provide a broad exposure for the cohorts, (iii) they provide current challenges for our students to tackle for their doctoral research, iv) they give a very wide experience and perspective of possible applications and sectors thereby making the students highly flexible and extremely attractive to employers, and v) they provide significant funding for the CDT activities. Each cohort will learn how to apply appropriate mathematical techniques to a wide range of industrial problems in a highly interactive environment. In year one, the students will be trained in mathematical skills spanning continuum and discrete modelling, and scientific computing, closely integrated with practical applications and problem solving. The experience of addressing industrial problems and understanding their context will be further enhanced by periods where our partners will deliver a broad range of relevant material. Students will undertake two industrially focused mini-projects, one from an academic perspective and the other immersed in a partner organisation. Each student will then embark on their doctoral research project which will allow them to hone their skills and techniques while tackling a practical industrial challenge. The resulting doctoral students will be highly sought after; by industry for their flexible and quantitative abilities that will help them gain a competitive edge, and by universities to allow cutting-edge mathematical research to be motivated by practical problems and be readily exploitable.

Industrial Biotechnology (IB) is entering a golden age of opportunity. Technological and scientific advances in biotechnology have revolutionised our ability to synthesise molecules of choice, giving access to novel chemistries that enable tuneable selectivity and the use of benign reaction conditions. These developments can now be coupled to advances in the industrialisation of biology to generate innovative manufacturing routes, supported by high throughput and real-time analytics, process automation, artificial intelligence and data-driven science. The current excess energy demands of manufacturing and its use of expensive and resource intensive materials can no longer be tolerated. Impacts on climate change (carbon emissions), societal health (toxic waste streams, pollution) and the environment (depletion of precious resources, waste accumulation) are well documented and unsustainable. What is clear is that a petrochemical-dependent economy cannot support the rate at which we consume goods and the demand we place on cheap and easily accessible materials. The emergent bioeconomy, which fosters resource efficiency and reduced reliance on fossil resources, promises to free society from many of the shortcomings of current manufacturing practices. By harnessing the power of biology through innovative IB, the FBRH will support the development of safer, cleaner and greener manufacturing supply chains. This is at the core of the UKs Clean Growth strategy. The EPSRC Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub (FBRH) will deliver biomanufacturing processes to support the rapid emergence of the bioeconomy and to place the UK at the forefront of global economic Clean Growth in key manufacturing sectors - pharmaceuticals; value-added chemicals; engineering materials. The FBRH will be a biomanufacturing accelerator, coordinating UK academic, HVM catapult, and industrial capabilities to enable the complete biomanufacturing innovation pipeline to deliver economic, robust and scalable bioprocesses to meet societal and commercial demand. The FBRH has developed a clear strategy to achieve this vision. This strategy addresses the need to change the economic reality of biomanufacturing by addressing the entire manufacturing lifecycle, by considering aspects such as scale-up, process intensification, continuous manufacturing, integrated and whole-process modelling. The FBRH will address the urgent need to quickly deliver new biocatalysts, robust industrial hosts and novel production technologies that will enable rapid transition from proof-of-concept to manufacturing at scale. The emphasis is on predictable deployment of sustainable and innovative biomanufacturing technologies through integrated technology development at all scales of production, harnessing UK-wide world-leading research expertise and frontier science and technology, including data-driven AI approaches, automation and new technologies emerging from the 'engineering of biology'. The FBRH will have its Hub at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology at The University of Manchester, with Spokes at the Innovation and Knowledge Centre for Synthetic Biology (Imperial College London), Advanced Centre for Biochemical Engineering (University College London), the Bioprocess, Environmental and Chemical Technologies Group (Nottingham University), the UK Catalysis Hub (Harwell), the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (Glasgow) and the Centre for Process Innovation (Wilton). This collaborative approach of linking the UK's leading IB centres that hold complementary expertise together with industry will establish an internationally unique asset for UK manufacturing.