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.

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.

The project will develop methodologies for a novel, fully tailored, biofuel blend production process which optimises the blends and their production design parameters on the basis of a range of targets: performance in engines, real world emissions on blending with gasoline and diesel, overall sustainability, practical suitability for automotive use, and biofuel production costs. The aim is to develop a process design which is able to use a variety of low grade biomass feedstocks, thus contributing to the requirements of the next phase of the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED) for increased use of advanced biofuels. The transport sector contributes ~14% to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, principally from petroleum derived liquid fuels. Transport therefore presents a key challenge in developing low carbon economies. Due to energy density challenges in developing alternative drive trains, or propulsion systems for heavy goods, shipping and aviation sectors, societal reliance on liquid fuels is likely to continue beyond the near term. It is therefore crucial to produce liquid fuels with lower lifetime GHG emissions compared to fossil fuels. This is mandated by the EU through the RED requiring member states to source >10% of transport energy from renewables by 2020, rising to 32% by 2030. The revised RED II requires all road transport fuels sold in the EU to include a minimum 3.5 % of "advanced biofuels" - liquid fuels derived from non-fossil feed stocks not in direct competition with food for land use; essentially stipulating the use of lignocellulose and wastes. Advanced biofuels face challenges to be cost competitive with fossil fuels, and even 1st generation biofuels, due to the inferior nature of lignocellulosic feed stocks. Methodologies with fewer processing steps offer greater potential for cost effective production are thus emphasised in this work which will develop optimal processes for the production of biofuel blends compatible with either diesel or gasoline. The use of biofuel blends may present advantages over single component biofuels such as ethanol, as multi-component mixtures can extend blend walls and therefore potentially promote the use of larger biofuel fractions on blending with petroleum fuels, leading to the potential for greater GHG reductions. The project will develop a process for the production of biofuel blends based on alkylevulinate, ester and alcohol components via several different starting alcohol routes. In Phase I, experimental studies will parameterise the performance of various acid hydrolysis configurations on different sugar and carbohydrate sources (e.g. model compounds, miscanthus, cellulose, algae, household wastes), using methanol, ethanol, butanol, and different acid types. The influence of temperature, pressure, and reaction time, on yields, energy requirements, process difficulty and product compatibility with existing infrastructure will be studied. In parallel, important chemical and physical properties of the biofuel blends will be determined, as well as sustainability factors, providing boundaries on feasible fractions of the different components in the blended fuel. In Phase II detailed engine emissions and performance characteristics of the fuels on blending with diesel/gasoline will be investigated, using experimental and model simulation tools. Real world emissions factors will be established for the fuel blends based on instrumented engines and on-road vehicles. These emissions factors as well as all techno-economic factors will feed into a final lifecycle techno-economic-sustainability (TES) assessment to determine optimal blends. Both GHG and emissions of relevance to air quality will be included. This TES will be coupled to an optimisation procedure to determine process conditions suitable for the production of optimal blends. The overall output of the project will be a process design suitable for producing an optimum techno-economic & sustainable advanced biofuel.

The complex and multi-scale nature of thin-films poses significant modelling challenges for many systems which occur in nature or industrial contexts ranging from foams, to engine lubricants in electric vehicles, from biomembranes to non-alcoholic beverages, from contact lenses to industrial coatings. The applications of the thin liquid films where the interface is contaminated either accidentally or on purpose, are endless. This naturally leads to considerable research and economic opportunities associated with the ability to understand and control the effect of additives and contaminants on the thin-film interface. The main difficulty here, after many years of intense research, remains with the fact that the role of a contaminant on the interface is generally not well understood. We are starting to understand the effect of surfactants, which is a subset of contaminants with surface-active agents, such as washing up liquid and detergents, but a generalised theory of contaminants remains elusive. This is due to not only the limited models of surface-altering agents upto dilute concentrations, which is not always the case in nature, but also the lack of an unifying framework upon which to study contaminants that are not surfactants. This project will provide such an unifying mathematical framework to study a generalised contaminant on a thin liquid film. By describing the inputs of the generalised contaminant into the system as contributing to an effective gradient in the surface tension, induced by whichever special property the contaminant possesses, our approach introduces new mechanisms into the continuum dynamics and allows comparisons to be made with experimental studies which often combines multiple effects of the contaminant. Disentangling the various nonlinear effects in the contaminant is a difficult problem which cannot be overlooked. The mathematical framework is a vital first step towards a complete categorisation of all the component in the multiphysics soup of a generalised contaminant solution. This categorisation not only allows us to tackle vastly more complex contaminants than previous possible, but also enables us to engineer thin liquid interfaces to an exacting specification or stability for a particular application, such as a non-alcoholic beer with the same foaming characteristics as an alcoholic version or a non-foaming engine lubricant for high-efficiency electric vehicles, both of which are examples of thin liquid interfaces which would benefit from a complete understanding of the role contaminants play on the surface.