This project is designed to promote a synergy of the skills and expertise of key personnel in several key research groups, across a range of disciplines both in the UK and overseas, and working with targeted user communities to share their expertise and wide experience, with the people involved enthusiastically collaborating for success. In so doing, the prime theme of this project is to create new technological opportunities which would otherwise be very difficult to develop individually due to the limitations in individual facilities and resources and the depth of knowledge required, to create real innovation over a broad technological field. Most importantly, the focus of the application is on the team brought together to 'bring out the best' in a group of engineers with complementary skills, to achieve the step change that is needed to meet the challenges of competitiveness for the user community over the next decade and beyond. The consortium brought together for the first time, is one of significant diversity, which encompassing expertise and experience in optical fibre sensors, MEMS sensor design, fabrication and integration, chemistry, chemical engineering, communications and civil structures and has been created to make the step change in both the required sensor technologies and material science and thus developing a competitive edge to meet demands from user communities. The consortium has an excellent balance of experienced and early career staff, but above all is a group with the intellectual depth and drive to be successful, to take on new challenges and meet new opportunities.The project planned adds a new dimension to what is a very strong current grants portfolio of the UK consortium. The applicants hold a number of prestigious grants - amongst them 2 Platform Grants, 2 Challenging Engineering grants and 1 Advanced Fellowship (the latter two specifically recognizing excellence among early career researchers), together with a number of Responsive Mode grants and contracts with a strong KT dimension e.g. KTPs, which together emphasize meeting today's research needs.

Much of our current infrastructure, built of modern materials such as concrete, has or will require extensive repair, in service - often after even a relatively short period of its design life or to extend that life and reduce the costs on 'new build'. Currently an estimated ~600M is spent annually on the repair and maintenance of concrete infrastructure in the UK alone, a figure that is multiplied many times across the developed nations. Serviceability and enhanced whole life performance are critical to effective use and the long-term monitoring of such structures is invaluable to ensure full structural capability, to minimize risk to the public and give value for money. Further, there is a clear future for concrete infrastructure: the advancement of lightweight materials with a long service life is seen as essential to sustainable development, for example using highly durable lightweight, low energy concrete which can be used in a novel and pre-cast products and incorporating within it advanced monitoring systems. However, critical to achieving the maximum value from our infrastructure is a fuller understanding of the needs and challenges of allowing for better assessment of existing structures during their service lifetime as well as the creation of better structures for the future, using new materials. In both cases effective monitoring systems, installed or retrofitted and used to give reliable and informative data, having the confidence of the user community and industry, need to be developed and used widely. Thus monitoring and evaluation of the efficacy of repair strategies, as a key aspect of structural health monitoring, is the target of this proposal. This is made possible, uniquely in this project, by two factors coming together - the availability of a bridge where the damage conditions that have been applied since the bridge was moved to its present site will be well known and closely documented (as part of work done by NPL), as are the repair strategies that have been and will be applied to it. Addressing this in this project is the use of new, calibrated monitoring devices applied both during the repair procedure itself and subsequently, in both cases to allow the effects of the repair on the bridge to be monitored quantitatively and the work is thus very complementary to and adds value to research currently at NPL. Conventional SHM provides an assessment which allows the owners of large engineering assets to schedule maintenance more accurately, and can give an early warning of possible structural failure. The sort of system proposed in this project will provide early warning of potential problems and help in the better planning of maintenance and repair: the proposal herein will allow the repair strategies to be determined, monitored and evaluated. The overall aim is thus for better information to predict the likely potential for failure, the need for repair, the efficacy of the repair and thus the likely lifetime of a structure such as a bridge. This recognizes the wide industrial need for predictive systems that can monitor structures and inform the asset holder on its state of health, both in terms of its physical structure and chemical changes, where the type of structure could include bridges, buildings, power plant, aircraft, chemical plant etc. Even just considering the situation with bridges, a simple clear indication of the structure's health will provide substantial economic benefits since there are over 10,000 bridges worth more than 1M each in the UK alone - offering effective repair and thus cheaper maintenance and lower running costs would thus be of significant benefit.

This 'follow-on' project builds upon the success of recent work undertaken by the applicants, particularly under the first round of the EPSRC Challenging Engineering Programme and, critically, takes that research forward towards industrial application and exploitation. The work continues the strong interdisciplinary partnership between Electrical Engineering at City University London (CUL) and Civil Engineering at Queen's University of Belfast (QUB), working together with their respective Technology Transfer Officers (TTOs) to take full advantage of the excellent relationship forged, including with the spin-out company, Sengenia, and the other industrial partners, Network Rail, Roads Services of Northern Ireland, Amey Plc and Collins Engineering. There is a clear focus of the proposal - to make the commercial potential of the research more evident, both to the market and to set a platform for generating sustainable interest from future funding organizations to create the right conditions for commercial exploitation of the technology. The key technical strength, underpinning the commercial potential and providing the capability, is the successful development (through the support from EPSRC EP/D030269/1, EP/D030196/1, EP/D009162/1, EP/F012829/1) of novel corrosion sensor systems for monitoring early signatures of concrete corrosion. This has enabled the creation of, for the first time to the knowledge of applicants, new, tailored, durable in-situ pH sensors which have a demonstrable capability to measure pH values higher than 12 and chloride sensors which have not just been able to measure free chloride concentrations (to a level as low as 20mM) but also been sustainable in the high alkaline environment experienced.The research undertaken to date has shown real promise to bridge currently identified market gaps by providing better monitoring solutions for both marine and civil infrastructures and thus to overcome current commercial limitations in the UK and beyond, especially in terms of the sensing range, sensitivity and durability. Several important technical and commercial challenges have been identified which are well attuned to the Follow-on funding agenda and the success of this proposal promises industry access to better data to allow more timely maintenance and cost saving - creating a successful commercial proposition, to the benefit of UK and global industry. It should be stressed that this application to the Follow-on Fund is targeted not simply at another year's work on sensors per se but is designed to make the ideas generated and the work done better suited to rapid commercial exploitation, to the benefit both of industry and academia. The approach taken is built on the support of and advice from both an SME and end users, to give a better understanding of decay and corrosion processes in the built environment.

Globally, national infrastructure is facing significant challenges: - Ageing assets: Much of the UK's existing infrastructure is old and no longer fit for purpose. In its State of the Nation Infrastructure 2014 report the Institution of Civil Engineers stated that none of the sectors analysed were "fit for the future" and only one sector was "adequate for now". The need to future-proof existing and new infrastructure is of paramount importance and has become a constant theme in industry documents, seminars, workshops and discussions. - Increased loading: Existing infrastructure is challenged by the need to increase load and usage - be that number of passengers carried, numbers of vehicles or volume of water used - and the requirement to maintain the existing infrastructure while operating at current capacity. - Changing climate: projections for increasing numbers and severity of extreme weather events mean that our infrastructure will need to be more resilient in the future. These challenges require innovation to address them. However, in the infrastructure and construction industries tight operating margins, industry segmentation and strong emphasis on safety and reliability create barriers to introducing innovation into industry practice. CSIC is an Innovation and Knowledge Centre funded by EPSRC and Innovate UK to help address this market failure, by translating world leading research into industry implementation, working with more than 40 industry partners to develop, trial, provide and deliver high-quality, low cost, accurate sensor technologies and predictive tools which enable new ways of monitoring how infrastructure behaves during construction and asset operation, providing a whole-life approach to achieving sustainability in an integrated way. It provides training and access for industry to source, develop and deliver these new approaches to stimulate business and encourage economic growth, improving the management of the nation's infrastructure and construction industry. Our collaborative approach, bringing together leaders from industry and academia, accelerates the commercial development of emerging technologies, and promotes knowledge transfer and industry implementation to shape the future of infrastructure. Phase 2 funding will enable CSIC to address specific challenges remaining to implementation of smart infrastructure solutions. Over the next five years, to overcome these barriers and create a self-sustaining market in smart infrastructure, CSIC along with an expanded group of industry and academic partners will: - Create the complete, innovative solutions that the sector needs by integrating the components of smart infrastructure into systems approaches, bringing together sensor data and asset management decisions to improve whole life management of assets and city scale infrastructure planning; spin-in technology where necessary, to allow demonstration of smart technology in an integrated manner. - Continue to build industry confidence by working closely with partners to demonstrate and deploy new smart infrastructure solutions on live infrastructure projects. Develop projects on behalf of industry using seed-funds to fund hardware and consumables, and demonstrate capability. - Generate a compelling business case for smart infrastructure solutions together with asset owners and government organisations based on combining smarter information with whole life value models for infrastructure assets. Focus on value-driven messaging around the whole system business case for why smart infrastructure is the future, and will strive to turn today's intangibles into business drivers for the future. - Facilitate the development and expansion of the supply chain through extending our network of partners in new areas, knowledge transfer, smart infrastructure standards and influencing policy.

Much of our current infrastructure, built of modern materials such as concrete, has required extensive repair after being in service for even a relatively short period of its design life. Currently ~600M pa is spent annually on the repair and maintenance of concrete infrastructure the UK alone, a figure that is multiplied many times across the developed nations. Serviceability and whole life performance is critical to effective use and the long-term monitoring of such structures is invaluable to ensure full structural capability and to minimize risk to the public and give value for money. For example, the advancement of lightweight, durable materials is seen as essential to future sustainable development, using highly durable lightweight, low energy concrete which can be used in a novel flexible concrete arch and other pre-cast products, incorporating within it advanced monitoring systems. However, in order to understand more fully the needs and challenges of creating better structures for the future using such materials (and allowing for better assessment of existing structures during their service lifetime) effective monitoring systems that can be installed and used to give reliable and informative data, having the confidence of industry need to be developed and used widely. Thus this project has been designed as a short, 12-month truly interdisciplinary study, to cross compare the issues surrounding the installation, use, data capture and evaluation of performance of several complementary techniques for structural monitoring. Uniquely the application and time scale is set by an opportunistic set of circumstances which allows for a 'test-to-destruction' of a footbridge on the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) site at Teddington, as part of its redevelopment. This very advantageously gives unhindered access to the bridge to be investigated without inconvenience to the public or, for example, significant costs in rerouting traffic or travel to and installation of equipment at a remote site. The work planned involves close cooperation between staff at NPL, funded by the National Measurement System and by the DIUS working in conjunction with academics at City University and supported and advised by relevant industries, involving both the construction industry and a fibre optic sensor manufacturer. This work planned is to be carried out in collaboration with a major project supported by the Department of Industry, Universities and Skills (DIUS / the successor to DTI): Project AM14: Enabling the Next Generation of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM): Demonstrator, Validation and Best Practice by widening the scope of the entire study to include the input from City University and its expertise on fibre optic sensors. This aspect had not been included in the original DIUS-funded programme and the raison-d'tre for so doing arose from a recent opportunistic contact between staff at NPL and City University. Thus this specific application to EPSRC is for funding support for a small part of the planned work overall / for the direct, additional costs of the academic involvement in the project. It should be stressed that this is an application which if not supported at this time cannot be resubmitted in six months time: the opportunity to carry out these tests will have gone as by then the timescale for the work, in light of the demolition schedule, will have passed.