The vision of RM4L is that, by 2022 we will have achieved a transformation in construction materials, using the biomimetic approach first adopted in M4L, to create materials that will adapt to their environment, develop immunity to harmful actions, self-diagnose the on-set of deterioration and self-heal when damaged. This innovative research into smart materials will engender a step-change in the value placed on infrastructure materials and provide a much higher level of confidence and reliability in the performance of our infrastructure systems. The ambitious programme of inter-related work is divided into four Research Themes (RTs); RT1: Self-healing of cracks at multiple scales, RT2: Self-healing of time-dependent and cyclic loading damage, RT3: Self-diagnosis and immunisation against physical damage, and RT4: Self-diagnosis and healing of chemical damage. These bring together the four complementary technology areas of self-diagnosis (SD); self-immunisation and self-healing (SH); modelling and tailoring; and scaling up to address a diverse range of applications such as cast in-situ, precast, repair systems, overlays and geotechnical systems. Each application will have a nominated 'champion' to ensure viable solutions are developed. There are multiple inter-relationships between the Themes. The nature of the proposed research will be highly varied and encompass, amongst other things, fundamental physico-chemical actions of healing systems, flaws in potentially viable SH systems; embryonic and high-risk ideas for SH and SD; and underpinning mathematical models and optimisation studies for combined self-diagnosing/self-healing/self-immunisation systems. Industry, including our industrial partners throughout the construction supply chain and those responsible for the provision, management and maintenance of the world's built environment infrastructure will be the main beneficiaries of this project. We will realise our vision by addressing applications that are directly informed by these industrial partners. By working with them across the supply chain and engaging with complementary initiatives such as UKCRIC, we will develop a suite of real life demonstration projects. We will create a network for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) in this field which will further enhance the diversity and reach of our existing UK Virtual Centre of Excellence for intelligent, self-healing construction materials. We will further exploit established relationships with the international community to maximise impact and thereby generate new initiatives in a wide range of related research areas, e.g. bioscience (bacteria); chemistry (SH agents); electrochemical science (prophylactics); computational mechanics (tailoring and modelling); material science and engineering (nano-structures, polymer composites); sensors and instrumentation and advanced manufacturing. Our intention is to exploit the momentum in outreach achieved during the M4L project and advocate our work and the wider benefits of EPRSC-funded research through events targeted at the general public and private industry. The academic impact of this research will be facilitated through open-access publications in high-impact journals and by engagement with the wider research community through interdisciplinary networks, conferences, seminars and workshops.

The Centre for Climate Change Transformations (C3T) will be a global hub for understanding the profound changes required to address climate change. At its core, is a fundamental question of enormous social significance: how can we as a society live differently - and better - in ways that meet the urgent need for rapid and far-reaching emission reductions? While there is now strong international momentum on action to tackle climate change, it is clear that critical targets (such as keeping global temperature rise to well within 2 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels) will be missed without fundamental transformations across all parts of society. C3T's aim is to advance society's understanding of how to transform lifestyles, organisations and social structures in order to achieve a low-carbon future, which is genuinely sustainable over the long-term. Our Centre will focus on people as agents of transformation in four challenging areas of everyday life that impact directly on climate change but have proven stubbornly resistant to change: consumption of goods and physical products, food and diet, travel, and heating/cooling. We will work across multiple scales (individual, community, organisational, national and global) to identify and experiment with various routes to achieving lasting change in these challenging areas. In particular, we will test how far focussing on 'co-benefits' will accelerate the pace of change. Co-benefits are outcomes of value to individuals and society, over and above the benefits from reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These may include improved health and wellbeing, reduced waste, better air quality, greater social equality, security, and affordability, as well as increased ability to adapt and respond to future climate change. For example, low-carbon travel choices (such as cycling and car sharing) may bring health, social and financial benefits that are important for motivating behaviour and policy change. Likewise, aligning environmental and social with economic objectives is vital for behaviour and organisational change within businesses. Our Research Themes recognise that transformative change requires: inspiring yet workable visions of the future (Theme 1); learning lessons from past and current societal shifts (Theme 2); experimenting with different models of social change (Theme 3); together with deep and sustained engagement with communities, business and governments, and a research culture that reflects our aims and promotes action (Theme 4). Our Centre integrates academic knowledge from disciplines across the social and physical sciences with practical insights to generate widespread impact. Our team includes world-leading researchers with expertise in climate change behaviour, choices and governance. We will use a range of theories and research methods to fill key gaps in our understanding of transformation at different spatial and social scales, and show how to target interventions to impactful actions, groups and moments in time. We will partner with practitioners (e.g., Climate Outreach, Greener-UK, China Centre for Climate Change Communication), policy-makers (e.g., Welsh Government) and companies (e.g., Anglian Water) to develop and test new ways of engaging with the public, governments and businesses in the UK and internationally. We will enhance citizens', organisations' and societal leaders' capacity to tackle climate change through various mechanisms, including secondments, citizens' panels, small-scale project funding, seminars, training, workshops, papers, blog posts and an interactive website. We will also experiment with transformations within academia itself, by trialling sustainable working practices (e.g., online workshops), being 'reflexive' (studying our own behaviour and its impacts on others), and making our outputs and data publically available.

This project aims to understand how novel energy storage technologies might best be integrated into an evolving, lower-carbon UK energy system in the future. It will identify technical, environmental, public acceptability, economic and policy issues, and will propose solutions to overcome barriers to deployment. As electricity is increasingly generated by highly-variable renewables and relatively inflexible nuclear power stations, alternatives to the use of highly-flexible fossil-fuelled generation as a means of balancing the electricity system will become increasingly valuable. Numerous technologies for storing electricity are under development to meet this demand, and as the cost of storage is reduced through innovation, it is possible that they could have an important role in a low-carbon energy system. The Energy Storage Supergen Hub is producing a UK roadmap for energy storage that will be the starting point for this project. The value of grid-scale storage to the electricity system has been assessed for some scenarios. For extreme cases comprising only renewable and nuclear generation, the value is potentially substantial. However, the value of energy storage to the UK depends on the costs and benefits relative to sharing electricity imbalances through greater European interconnection, demand-side electricity response, and wider energy system storage, and the optimal approaches to integrating energy storage at different levels across the whole energy system are not well understood. This project will take a broader approach than existing projects by considering energy system scenarios in which storage options are more integrated across the whole energy system, using a series of soft-linked energy and electricity system models. Demand-side response and increased interconnection will be considered as counterfactual technologies that reduces the need for storage. Three broad hypotheses will be investigated in this project: (i) that a whole energy system approach to ES is necessary to fully understand how different technologies might contribute as innovation reduces costs and as the UK energy system evolves; (ii) that a range of technological, economic and social factors affect the value of ES, so should all be considered in energy system scenarios; and, (iii) that the economic value of the difference between good and bad policy decisions relating to the role of energy storage in the transition to low-carbon generation is in the order of £bns. A broader, multidisciplinary approach, which extends beyond the techno-economic methodologies that are adopted by most studies, will be used to fully assess the value of energy storage. This project will therefore also examine public acceptability issues for the first time, compare the environmental impacts of storage technologies using life-cycle analyses, and examine important economic issues surrounding market design to realise the value of storage services provided by consumers. All of these analyses will be underpinned by the development of technology-neutral metrics for ES technologies to inform the project modelling work and the wider scientific community. These multidisciplinary considerations will be combined in a series of integrated future scenarios for energy storage to identify no-regrets technologies. The project will conclude by examining the implications of these scenarios for UK Government policy, energy regulation and research priorities. The analyses will be technical only to the point of identifying the requirements for energy storage, with absolutely no bias towards or against any classes of storage technology.

The UK faces serious strategic challenges with the future supply of aggregates, critical minerals and elements. At the same time, the UK must sustainably manage multimillion tonne annual arisings of industrial, mining and mineral wastes (IMMWs). The amount of these wastes generated is projected to increase over the coming years, particularly (i) ash from the combustion of biomass and municipal solid waste, and (ii) contaminated dredgings. These wastes will continue to be landfilled despite often containing valuable resources such as high concentrations of critical metals, soil macronutrients and useful mineral components, some of which actively drawdown atmospheric CO2. The fundamental aim of the ASPIRE (Accelerated Supergene Processes In Repository Engineering) research project is to develop a sustainable method by which ashes, contaminated dredgings and other IMMWs can be stripped of any valuable elements. These stripped elements would then be concentrated in an ore zone for later retrieval and the cleaned residues also returned to use, for example as aggregates, cement additives, or agricultural amendments (including those for carbon sequestration through enhanced mineral weathering). It is a very challenging problem to devise a truly sustainable method to achieve this is an economically viable way, and almost all processes suggested so far in the literature for leaching wastes are themselves carbon and chemical intensive and thus non-sustainable. We are proposing research that comprises the first steps in developing the "ASPIRE waste repository" concept with accelerated analogues of ore-forming "supergene" processes engineered in, such that the dormant waste undergoes processes to (i) concentrate valuable components (e.g. critical metals, phosphate) as an anthropogenic ore to facilitate their future recovery, and (ii) concurrently decontaminate residual mineral material so as to make it available as a bank of material to drawdown for "soft" uses in agriculture, silviculture, greenspace, landscaping in new developments, habitat creation and/or as a cement/concrete additive or replacement aggregate. The processes investigated rely on rainwater passing through a vegetated surface layer which releases naturally occurring compounds from the plant roots and/or other natural organic matter which then pass through and strip valuable elements from the IMMW. The mobilised elements will then pass into a capture zone where they will be stripped from solution and concentrated to form an artificial ore. The research project will seek to engineer the internal processes of the temporary storage waste repository to optimise this. At the same time the upper vegetated surface of the waste repository will serve as greenspace with commensurate ecological and amenity value for local populations. Among the key research challenges is in how to engineer the internal ASPIRE waste repository processes which rely on complex biogeochemical interactions and flow behaviour. Another critical research challenge is to develop an understanding of stakeholder and wider acceptability of this concept which does not fit with current legislation on waste management. With this project we seek to provide a circular technology solution for how we can sustainably manage the future multimillion tonne arisings of IMMW at a critical time as the UK government develops strategies and supporting regulation for the transition to a circular economy.

Climate change is causing, and will continue to cause, more intense precipitation events and greater amplitude of warm and cold temperatures leading to severe flooding, extreme drying, freezing and thawing. This will affect many parts of the urban geo-infrastructure such as shallow foundations, retaining structures, buried utilities, road subbase and railway formations. The costs of damage due to shrink/swell movements on clay soils have resulted in economic losses of over £1.6 billion in the UK during drought years. The novelty of the proposed research is the development of "climate adaptation composite barrier systems" (comprising water holding layers and a capillary barrier) capable of limiting the impact of a changing environment on the geo-infrastructure and hence increasing their engineering sustainability and resilience. Environmental cyclic actions imposed on our infrastructure are governed by soil-plant-atmosphere interaction, which is a coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical problem driven by the atmosphere and influenced by soil type, stress history, stress level, mineralogy, soil-water chemistry and vegetation. Understanding this complex problem requires systematic research and a coherent approach. This proposal describes systematic experimental and numerical modelling studies to understand the response of composite barrier systems, when subjected to extreme weather events and long-term climate changes, and to develop appropriate sustainable adaptation technologies to mitigate potential impacts on urban geo-infrastructure.