Helping to address the sustainability agenda through informed personal travel has been an area of intense research activity with many new forms of information collection and dissemination having been investigated. Much less well studied is the problem of maintaining the transport infrastructure in a sustainable fashion. In our work we wish to explore in the wild how new developments in travel information gathering and dissemination can be used to drive more sustainable approaches to maintaining the UK's transport infrastructure. The project builds on successful collaborations established through funded research projects (Our Travel (TSB), Faith (TSB/EPSRC), Smart Streets (TSB)) and looks to test in the wild ideas emerging from new areas of academic research as typified by the RCUK funded Sixth Sense Transport project. Our work builds on two recent research projects, i.e. Our Travel and Sixth Sense. Within the Our Travel project the consortium have shown how crowd-sourced transport information can be integrated with highways maintenance activities to help better coordinate work activities and to ensure timely dissemination of information regarding maintenance activities to travellers. The on-going Sixth Sense Transport project is a multidisciplinary academic research project involving the Universities of Southampton (transport), Edinburgh (design), Salford (psychology) and Bournemouth (tourism) that is looking to encourage travellers to adopt a more sustainable approach to travel. To this end the project is developing applications that allow travellers to see predictions of future travel patterns of other users, enabling them to avoid congestion and make more opportunistic use of travel links, particularly across transport modes and between travellers. For example, the project looks to encourage travellers to identify opportunities for shared travel, convert single-purpose trips into multi-purpose trips, engage in collaborative logistics and shift to mixed-mode transport by providing simple interactive maps that show traces of both past and future travel patterns. Our interest is in exploring whether the idea of using such predictive travel patterns can help provide a more sustainable approach to maintaining the UK's transport infrastructure. At present many highways maintenance activities are driven largely by a need to comply with contractual KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). This tends to lead to an inherently unsustainable "earliest deadline first" approach to scheduling that significantly increases the environmental overhead associated with highways maintenance. Prediction of future travel patterns may help in two distinct ways. Firstly, by enabling highways maintenance engineers to predict future travel patterns they can schedule work in a way that minimises traffic disruption - particularly with respect to journeys that involve multiple transport modes (e.g. driving to the station to catch a train). This can lead to a significant reduction in congestion and associated emissions. Secondly, by predicting future travel patterns of their own maintenance vehicles highways maintenance engineers can maximise the potential for opportunistic improvements to work-flows. For example, it may be possible to identify opportunities for maintenance operatives to opportunistically share tools and materials such as tarmac without the need to return to base between road repairs - reducing transport costs and environmental impact. More generally, in this research we are looking to enable a shift from a reactive, and distinctly inefficient and environmentally costly model of scheduling to a predictive, opportunistic model that looks to minimise the environmental impact of work.

An understanding of how food behaves in the body is obviously important. There is a physical dimension to this, in addition to nutritional and biochemical factors. Central to the work proposed in this grant is the idea that foods can mix with saliva and other water based fluids to different levels of efficiency and this impacts on how the food tastes and behaves when eaten. It is has been demonstrated that saltiness is perceived as being higher from starch thickened foods when compared to foods thickened with other materials, even though the viscosity and level of salt are the same. The reason for this is that in the starch system much of the starch remains in a particulate form, while the other materials form solutions that are then hard to mix. In the mouth, sodium that remains in the food and cannot reach the taste receptors on the tongue will not be perceived as salty. Therefore ingredients that can be added to foods that give excellent mixing quality, and hence allow the best perception of flavour, are required. A major part of the project will concentrate on the development of new particulate thickening systems using hydrocolloids and starches (already common ingredients in foods) using physical technologies that use energy sources efficiently and have low wastage. Work at Nottingham partly through a Bridge LINK project, on which this full project is based, has demonstrated the feasibility of developing new particulate ingredients from hydrocolloids such as xanthan gum. Physically modified starch that maintain particulate structures in a similar way to chemically crosslinked starches are already available, but the project will use a new approaches to produce improved ingredients of this type. The project will use a combination of sensory evaluation and instrumental techniques to develop criteria to predict salt perception and mouthfeel. In addition, a limited amount of work will be performed to confirm that the mixing hypothesis is relevant to behaviour in the stomach. To deliver this programme will require a team of companies and academics working together to further develop and then exploit the understanding partly result from a Bridge LINK project. Industrial partners in the team will supply a detailed knowledge of both suitable starting ingredients for the processing technologies and foods that will benefit from new ingredients that would allow salt levels to be reduced whilst maintaining the same flavour. There is also a requirement for expertise and specialist equipment for extrusion processing and thermal analysis, which will be supplied by industry and management from staff that are free of the major teaching and administrative pressures of a successful applied science department. Hence, the programme will have five companies plus an academic partner in a consortium to deliver the work and who can translate the findings into 'better for you' food products without loss of quality.

Bio-lubricants have both environmental and technical advantages over their counterparts derived from mineral oils. In addition to being renewable, they are biodegradable, have lower volatile emissions and low environmental toxicity. They provide superior anti-wear protection and exhibit reduced combustibility. In addition, bio-lubricants have lower coefficients of friction, which results in reduced energy costs for equipment in which bio-lubricants as used. Although vegetable oils are used in blending some less stressed lubricants, their thermal stability is inadequate for the majority of applications as a consequence of the presence of excessive polyunsaturation of their constituent fatty acids. In view of the poor stability of conventional refined rapeseed oil, lubricant blenders currently favour the use of synthetic esters with a high renewables content of the production of the more stressed lubricant types; this more expensive base oil currently inhibits uptake of bio-lubricants by end users. Rapeseed oil has many physical and chemical properties that are advantageous for base oil for the lubricants industry. However, the total content of polyunsaturated fatty acids remains too high and the resulting instability is the principal barrier to its widespread use. The target set by the industry is reduction to less than 5% total PUFAs, whilst retaining the other desirable physical and chemical properties of rapeseed oil. To be economically competitive, some yield penalty in the crop and increased processing costs can be tolerated, as its principal competitor in the market place, low PUFA sunflower oil, is presently priced at up to $120/tonne more on the commodity markets. Nevertheless, the approaches we propose should result in little, if any, yield loss from fully developed varieties. The purpose of the project is to underpin the development of oilseed rape varieties for the production of oil for use in the lubricants industry. A key knowledge gap is an understanding of how to substantially reduce the content of polyunsaturated fatty acids in rapeseed oil without reducing the oil yield of the crop. We will address this knowledge gap and enable establishment of a closed supply chain. This involves: (a) The genetic improvement of oilseed rape by mutagenesis of specific genes in order to produce, from a high-yielding winter crop, oil very low in polyunsaturated fatty acids. (b) Assessment of the physical properties of the oil produced in order to validate its utility. (c) Provision of characterised oilseed rape lines to the breeding industry for the development of cultivars. (d) Catalysing assembly of a supply chain. The strategy is non-GM, so we anticipate no barriers to the widespread utilization of the resultant varieties in the UK.

Bio-lubricants have both environmental and technical advantages over their counterparts derived from mineral oils. In addition to being renewable, they are biodegradable, have lower volatile emissions and low environmental toxicity. They provide superior anti-wear protection and exhibit reduced combustibility. In addition, bio-lubricants have lower coefficients of friction, which results in reduced energy costs for equipment in which bio-lubricants as used. Although vegetable oils are used in blending some less stressed lubricants, their thermal stability is inadequate for the majority of applications as a consequence of the presence of excessive polyunsaturation of their constituent fatty acids. In view of the poor stability of conventional refined rapeseed oil, lubricant blenders currently favour the use of synthetic esters with a high renewables content of the production of the more stressed lubricant types; this more expensive base oil currently inhibits uptake of bio-lubricants by end users. Rapeseed oil has many physical and chemical properties that are advantageous for base oil for the lubricants industry. However, the total content of polyunsaturated fatty acids remains too high and the resulting instability is the principal barrier to its widespread use. The target set by the industry is reduction to less than 5% total PUFAs, whilst retaining the other desirable physical and chemical properties of rapeseed oil. To be economically competitive, some yield penalty in the crop and increased processing costs can be tolerated, as its principal competitor in the market place, low PUFA sunflower oil, is presently priced at up to $120/tonne more on the commodity markets. Nevertheless, the approaches we propose should result in little, if any, yield loss from fully developed varieties. The purpose of the project is to underpin the development of oilseed rape varieties for the production of oil for use in the lubricants industry. A key knowledge gap is an understanding of how to substantially reduce the content of polyunsaturated fatty acids in rapeseed oil without reducing the oil yield of the crop. We will address this knowledge gap and enable establishment of a closed supply chain. This involves: (a) The genetic improvement of oilseed rape by mutagenesis of specific genes in order to produce, from a high-yielding winter crop, oil very low in polyunsaturated fatty acids. (b) Assessment of the physical properties of the oil produced in order to validate its utility. (c) Provision of characterised oilseed rape lines to the breeding industry for the development of cultivars. (d) Catalysing assembly of a supply chain. The strategy is non-GM, so we anticipate no barriers to the widespread utilization of the resultant varieties in the UK.

Our national infrastructure - the systems of infrastructure networks (e.g. energy, water, transport, waste, ICT) that support services such as healthcare, education, emergency response and thereby ensure our social, economic and environmental wellbeing - faces a multitude of challenges. A growing population, modern economy and proliferation of new technologies have placed increased and new demands on infrastructure services and made infrastructure networks increasingly inter-connected. Meanwhile, investment has not kept up with the pace of change leaving many components at the end of their life. Moreover, global environmental change necessitates reduced greenhouse gas emissions and improved resilience to extreme events, implying major reconfigurations of these infrastructure systems. Addressing these challenges is further complicated by fragmented, often reactive, regulation and governance arrangements. Existing business models are considered by the Treasury Select Committee to provide poor value but few proven alternative models exist for mobilising finance, particularly in the current economic climate. Continued delivery of our civil infrastructure, particularly given current financial constraints, will require innovative and integrated thinking across engineering, economic and social sciences. If the process of addressing these issues is to take place efficiently, whilst also minimising associated risks, it will need to be underpinned by an appropriate multi-disciplinary approach that brings together engineering, economic and social science expertise to understand infrastructure financing, valuation and interdependencies under a range of possible futures. The evidence that must form the basis for such a strategic approach does not yet exist. However, evidence alone will be insufficient, so we therefore propose to establish a Centre of excellence, i-BUILD, that will bring together three UK universities with world-leading track records in engineering, economics and social sciences; a portfolio of pioneering inter-disciplinary research; and the research vision and capacity to deliver a multi-disciplinary analysis of innovative business models around infrastructure interdependencies. While national scale plans, projects and procedures set the wider agenda, it is at the scale of neighbourhoods, towns and cities that infrastructure is most dense and interdependencies between infrastructures, economies and society are most profound - this is where our bid is focussed. Balancing growth across regions and scales is crucial to the success of the national economy. Moreover, the localism agenda is encouraging local agents to develop new infrastructure related business but these are limited by the lack of robust new business models with which to do so at the local and urban scale. These new business models can only arise from a step change in the cost-benefit ratio for infrastructure delivery which we will achieve by: (i) reducing the costs of infrastructure delivery by understanding interdependencies and alternative finance models, (ii) improving valuation of infrastructure benefits by identifying and exploiting the social, environmental and economic opportunities, and, (iii) reconciling national and local priorities. The i-BUILD centre will deliver these advances through development of a new generation of value analysis tools, interdependency models and multi-scale implementation plans. These methods will be tested on integrative case studies that are co-created with an extensive stakeholder group, to provide demonstrations of new methods that will enable a revolution in the business of infrastructure delivery in the UK. Funding for a Centre provides the opportunity to work flexibly with partners in industry, local and national government to address a research challenge of national and international importance, whilst becoming an international landmark programme recognised for novelty, research excellence and impact.