Permeable (fast draining) infrastructure will reduce the impact from climate change and urbanisation related flooding, which has a projected annual global cost of £500bn by 2030. Flooding is expected to cost the UK economy £27bn annually by 2080, without investment in flood resilient infrastructure. Along with the 2020 government plan for green infrastructure development, it is timely to invest in flood resilient permeable infrastructure. An extreme example of flood-affected infrastructure are airport pavements, impacted by stormwater and ice/snow build-up causing aircraft skidding. Skidding accounts for nearly half of all post 1990 major global commercial air crashes. In 2017 a Heathrow snow event grounded over 50,000 passengers and required a hurried £10m purchase of de-icing equipment. The current methods for preventing ice/snow build-up damage the environment, aircraft components and runway surfaces, increasing infrastructure maintenance costs. Airport operators, seeking to address these concerns, have expressed a strong desire to use permeable concrete technology to keep infrastructure clear. Permeable concrete pavements are one of the most promising mitigation strategies to prevent surface flooding, they rapidly drain stormwater through otherwise impermeable infrastructure. Conventional permeable pavements are, however, prone to clogging, due to debris trapped within the pore network, blocking the pavement and reducing its drainage capacity. The frequent required maintenance degrades performance and service life and is difficult to perform in an active airport. Most importantly, conventional permeable pavements have insufficient strength, making them unsuited for airports. There is an urgent need for a new system that can reliably keep airports clear of standing water and ice/snow. I recently developed next generation clogging resistant permeable pavement (CRP) of uniform pore structure to address infrastructure flooding. It has improved strength (twice as strong >50 MPa) and higher permeability (ten times more) than conventional systems of equal porosity, yet does not clog despite exposure to stormwater sediments. This Fellowship will significantly reengineer my novel pavement to develop the first permeable pavement, with sufficient strength and resilience, for the extreme airport case, while also applicable to less extreme highway, railway and novel green wall scenarios. These step-change advancements will be achieved by steel reinforcement, used in permeable pavements for the first time. The structural performance, material integrity, skid resistance, long-term durability and hydrological (drainage) properties will be assessed for airport suitability and improved if required. This project will be the first to investigate conductive (direct contact) and convective (transmission through air) heat transfer through permeable pavements used in high-value heavy load-bearing infrastructure. I will use heat extracted from the ground (ground source energy system, GSES) in these new pavements to melt the deposited ice/snow and drain away the excess water. Conventional pavements can be heated by conduction only, whereas CRP can be heated through both conduction and convection (via the pores) as the novel pore structure also allows for natural convection. This Fellowship will, through extensive laboratory experimentation, computer modelling and the permanent large-scale deployment at Inverness Airport (spanning across multiple technology readiness levels (1-7), a measure of technology maturity), develop climate change resilient infrastructure materials that can be used to deliver a sustainable built environment resistant to flooding, ice/snow build-up and the harmful heat island effect. To achieve this ambitious goal, I will address significant structural, material, thermal and hydrological challenges with wide reaching economic, environmental and societal benefits to the construction and transportation sector.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Water Infrastructure & Resilience II (WIRe II) builds upon the highly successful collaboration between three of the UK's centres of excellence in water research (Cranfield, Sheffield and Newcastle Universities). One of the foundations of a thriving civic community and economy is having secure, resilient and sustainable water resources and services that: (i) provide affordable and equitable access to water; (ii) deliver a safe drinking water supply; (iii) provide wastewater services that don't pollute the environment; (iv) ensure there is enough water to meet the increasing demands from multiple sectors; and (v) are net beneficial to the environment, while protecting critical infrastructure from the impacts of climate change. This is placed against a backdrop of increased levels of dissatisfaction and higher expectations from civic communities on their water services, multiple demands on water resources and adaptations required from the impacts of climate change. With the UK population expected to grow from 69 million to 79 million by 2050, water resources have never been under as much pressure. Recent assessments have shown that only 14% of English rivers have good ecological status and no river has good chemical status. Water companies have also been placed under significant public examination from recent well-publicised pollution incidents from storm overflows and restrictions in water, with expectations that the UK will need to save 4billion litres of water per day by 2050. A collaborative and interdisciplinary approach is therefore essential for securing more resilient and sustainable water systems. There is also an urgent demand for improved water management as we move into a more sustainable world - the requirement for suitably skilled specialists with the appropriate interdisciplinary skills has never been higher. In developing the case for WIRe II, we have brought together an important group of civic partners, including the water utilities (with representation from all nations of the UK, covering water and wastewater services for 90% of the UKs population), organisations from the energy sector working on net zero technologies that have significant water demand and/or wastewater streams, regulators and civic groups, consultancies who work across the water-energy nexus, and partnerships with UKCRIC and DAFNI for access to world leading facilities. The CDT will be a significant contributor to addressing a clear skills gap identified by our partners and provide a future blueprint for enhanced training in the sector. We urgently need research to understand whole water systems (catchment, treatment and distribution processes) to achieve stable, safe water delivery to customers and the return of water back to the environment for multiple beneficial purposes. Such complexity requires inter- and trans-disciplinary research and a critical mass of experts and outputs. Three interconnected research themes will be addressed in WIRe II that align with key civic priorities: Safe and sustainable water resources for all; A resource neutral water sector; and Adapting to climate change. The WIRe II training programme has been developed with our partners to ensure we develop talent with the skills, competencies, and creativeness required to meet the changing demands of the sector. Built around the principles of deep vertical and horizontal integration of cohorts, students will progress through the CDT by undertaking a common induction semester, an assessed taught programme, an inspiring transferable skills curriculum and an annual Summer Challenge, alongside opportunities for national and international placements. We have evolved the programme to deliver the transformative science needed to tackle the rapidly changing demands and challenges being faced across our water systems and to develop the future leaders in the water and allied sectors.

This project addresses how environmental change affects the movement of sediment through rivers and into our oceans. Understanding the movement of suspended sediment is important because it is a vector for nutrients and pollutants, and because sediment also creates floodplains and nourishes deltas and beaches, affording resilience to coastal zones. To develop our understanding of sediment flows, we will quantify recent variations (1985-present) in sediment loads for every river on the planet with a width greater than 90 metres. We will also project how these river sediment loads will change into the future. These goals have not previously been possible to achieve because direct measurements of sediment transport through rivers have only ever been made on very few (<10% globally) rivers. We are proposing to avoid this difficulty by using a 35+ years of archive of freely available satellite imagery. Specifically, we will use the cloud-based Google Earth Engine to automatically analyse each satellite image for its surface reflectance, which will enable us to estimate the concentration of sediment suspended near the surface of rivers. In conjunction with other methods that characterise the flow and the mixing of suspended sediment through the water column, these new estimates of surface Suspended Sediment Concentration (SSC) will be used to calculate the total movement of suspended sediment through rivers. We then analyse our new database (which, with a five orders of magnitude gain in spatial resolution relative to the current state-of-the-art, will be unprecedented in its size and global coverage) of suspended sediment transport using novel Machine Learning techniques, within a Bayesian Network framework. This analysis will allow us to link our estimates of sediment transport to their environmental controls (such as climate, geology, damming, terrain), with the scale of the empirical analysis enabling a step-change to be obtained in our understanding of the factors driving sediment movement through the world's rivers. In turn, this will allow us to build a reliable model of sediment movement, which we will apply to provide a comprehensive set of future projections of sediment movement across Earth to the oceans. Such future projections are vital because the Earth's surface is undergoing a phase of unprecedented change (e.g., through climate change, damming, deforestation, urbanisation, etc) that will likely drive large transitions in sediment flux, with major and wide reaching potential impacts on coastal and delta systems and populations. Importantly, we will not just quantify the scale and trajectories of change, but we will also identify how the relative contributions of anthropogenic, climatic and land cover processes drive these shifts into the future. This will allow us to address fundamental science questions relating to the movement of sediment through Earth's rivers to our oceans, such as: 1. What is the total contemporary sediment flux from the continents to the oceans, and how does this total vary spatially and seasonally? 2. What is the relative influence of climate, land use and anthropogenic activities in governing suspended sediment flux and how have these roles changed? 3. How do physiographic characteristics (area, relief, connectivity, etc.) amplify or dampen sediment flux response to external (climate, land use, damming, etc) drivers of change and thus condition the overall response, evolution and trajectory of sediment flux in different parts of the world? 4. To what extent is the flux of sediment driven by extreme runoff generating events (e.g. Tropical Cyclones) versus more common, lower magnitude events? How will projected changes in storm frequency and magnitude affect the world's sediment fluxes in the future? 5. How will the global flux of sediment to the oceans change over the course of the 21st century under a range of plausible future environmental change scenarios?

Globally, one in four cities is facing water stress, and the projected demand for water in 2050 is set to increase by 55%. These are significant and difficult problems to overcome, however this also provides huge opportunity for us to reconsider how our water systems are built, operated and governed. Placing an inspirational student experience at the centre of our delivery model, the Water Resilience for Infrastructure and Cities (WRIC) Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) will nurture a new generation of research leaders to provide the multi-disciplinary, disruptive thinking to enhance the resilience of new and existing water infrastructure. In this context the WRIC CDT will seek to improve the resilience of water infrastructure which conveys and treats water and wastewater as well as the impacts of water on other infrastructure systems which provide vital public services in urban environments. The need for the CDT is simple: Water infrastructure is fundamental to our society and economy in providing benefit from water as a vital resource and in managing risks from water hazards, such as wastewater, floods, droughts, and environmental pollution. Recent water infrastructure failures caused by climate change have provided strong reminders of our need to manage these assets against the forces of nature. The need for resilient water systems has never been greater and more recognised in the context of our industrial infrastructure networks and facilities for water supply, wastewater treatment and urban drainage. Similarly, safeguarding critical infrastructure in key sectors such as transport, energy and waste from the impacts of water has never been more important. Combined, resilience in these systems is vitally important for public health and safety. Industry, regulators and government all recognise the huge skills gap. Therefore there is an imperative need for highly skilled graduates who can transcend disciplines and deliver innovative solutions to contemporary water infrastructure challenges. Centred around unique and world leading water infrastructure facilities, and building on an internationally renowned research consortium (Cranfield University, The University of Sheffield and Newcastle University), this CDT will produce scientists and engineers to deliver the innovative and disruptive thinking for a resilient water infrastructure future. This will be achieved through delivery of an inspirational and relevant and end user-led training programme for researchers. The CDT will be delivered in cohorts, with deeply embedded horizontal and vertical training and integration within, and between, cohorts to provide a common learning and skills development environment. Enhanced training will be spread across the consortium, using integrated delivery, bespoke training and giving students a set of unique experiences and skills. Our partners are drawn from a range of leading sector and professional organisations and have been selected to provide targeted contributions and added value to the CDT. Together we have worked with our project partners to co-create the strategic vision for WRIC, particularly with respect to the training needs and challenges to be addressed for development of resilience engineers. Their commitment is evidenced by significant financial backing with direct (>£2.4million) and indirect (>£1.6million) monetary contributions, agreement to sit on advisory boards, access to facilities and data, and contributions on our taught programme.

In Europe, the total value of sewer assets amounts to 2 trillion Euros. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that water collection systems in the USA have a total replacement value between $1 and $2 trillion. Similar figures can be assigned to other types of buried pipe assets which supply clean water and gas. In China alone 40,000 km of new sewer pipes are laid every year. However, little is known about the condition of these pipes despite the pressure on water and gas supply utility companies to ensure that they operate continuously, safely and efficiently. In order to do this properly, the utility operator must identify the initial signs of failure and then respond to the onset of failure rapidly enough to avoid loss of potable water supply, wastewater flooding or gas escape. This is attempted through targeted inspection which is typically carried out through man-entry or with CCTV approaches, although more sophisticated (e.g. tethered) devices have been developed and are used selectively. Nevertheless, and in spite of the fact that the UK is a world leader in this research area, these approaches are slow and labour intensive, analysis is subjective, and their deployment disrupts traffic. Moreover, because these inspections are necessarily infrequent and only cover a small proportion of the pipe network, serious degradation is often missed and pipe failures occur unexpectedly, requiring emergency repairs that greatly disrupt life of the road and adjacent buried utility infrastructure. This Programme Grant proposes a radical change in terms of buried pipe sensing in order to address the issues of pipe inspection and rehabilitation. It builds upon recent advances in sensors, nano- and micro-electronics research, communication and robotic autonomous systems and aims to develop a completely new pervasive robotics sensing technology platform which is autonomous and covers the entire pipe network. These robots will be able to travel, cooperate and interrogate the pipes from the inside, detect the onset of any defects continuously, navigate to and zoom on sub-millimetre scale defects to examine them in detail, communicate and guide any maintenance equipment to repair the infrastructure at an early sign of deterioration. By being tiny, they do not present a danger of being stuck, blocking the pipe if damaged or run out of power. By being abundant, they introduce a high level of redundancy in the inspection system, so that routine inspection can continue after a loss of a proportion of the sensors in the swarm. By making use of the propagation of sonic waves and other types of sensing these robots can monitor any changes in the condition of the pipe walls, joints, valves and lateral connections; they can detect the early development and growth of sub-millimetre scale operational or structural faults and pipe corrosion. An important benefit of this sensing philosophy is that it mimics nature, i.e. the individual sensors are small, cheap and unsophisticated, but a swarm of them is highly capable and precise. This innovation will be the first of its kind to deploy swarms of miniaturised robots in buried pipes together with other emerging in-pipe sensor, navigation and communication solutions with long-term autonomy. Linked to the related previous work, iBUILD (EP/K012398), ICIF (EP/K012347) and ATU's Decision Support System (EP/K021699), this Programme Grant will create the technology that has flexibility to adapt to different systems of governance globally. This work will be done in collaboration with a number of industry partners who will help to develop a new set of requirements for the new pervasive robotic sensing platform to work in clean water, wastewater and gas pipes. They will support the formation and operation of the new research Centre of Autonomous Sensing for Buried Infrastructure in the UK and ensure that the results of this research have strong practical outcomes.