Domestic CHP systems are an obvious way of both generating electricity with a high efficiency and reducing strain on the grid and local distribution systems. The move to electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles will place additional demand on the grid and overload the local electrical distribution system that can currently only cope with about 10% of households recharging vehicles. With domestic CHP systems a different mind-set is needed as it is necessary to consider the electricity generation to be a by-product of the heating demand, as the electricity can be exported. Although a small domestic boiler might have a rating of 12 kW the heating demand in the summer is of course much smaller and this leads to a lower power (but high efficiency) requirement for the Stirling engine. Consider the following example which assumes a baseline efficiency for a conventional boiler of 90%: For an electrical output of 1 kW the 'indicated power' of the Stirling engine would need to be 1.3 kW (to allow for losses that are mostly electrical losses in the generator and power electronics). With a pessimistic 28% efficiency assumption (Net W[e] out/Heat in), this will require a heat input of 3.6 kW, with 4 kW of fuel energy. The waste heat from the engine will provide 2.3 kW for domestic heating, and in a conventional boiler this would have required 2.6 kW of fuel energy. So, 1kW of electricity has been generated from an increased fuel energy consumption of 1.4 kW (= 4.0 - 2.6); an overall electrical efficiency of 71% assuming the heat is needed. This is about double the efficiency of a conventional power plant, once allowance is made for the grid transmission efficiency. The ultimate aim is for a Stirling engine with an electrical output of at least 1 kW, but as a demonstration unit the current work will produce a Stirling engine with an electrical output of 100 W. This smaller size has been chosen because we have a moving magnet motor of this rating that can be used as a generator. This will avoid the need to scale-up the motor design and will give a significant reduction in the project cost. This 100 W system will be large enough to install pressure transducers, thermocouples and displacement transducers, and the experimental data can be used to validate the modelling, so that there will be confidence in the model predictions of the larger engines. The smaller size will also reduce the manufacturing costs. Electrical heating will facilitate accurate measurements of the heat input, and avoid the need to develop a combustion system. Longer term, a catalytic combustion system would operate at a sufficiently low temperature so as to make NOx emissions negligible, and be suitable for a range of gaseous fuels. The attraction of CHP systems has already led to small linear Stirling generators being developed (e.g Sunpower/Microgen and Infinia/QEnergy systems). Although the idea has been well demonstrated these technologies have not been successful due to high ownership costs and reliability issues. The low cost manufacture of conventional displacer configurations is extremely challenging. A very significant benefit of the research proposed here will be the demonstration of a new engine configuration that radically simplifies the design and manufacture of the displacer - a key component. The cost reductions possible will greatly enhance the prospects of Stirling CHP systems. The US Department of Energy has recently funded several Stirling engine projects for domestic CHP (https://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=news-item/department-energy-announces-18-new-projects-accelerate-technologies-efficient-residential). Although the mass market is envisaged to be domestic CHP there are other niche markets for silent power generation that can be exploited, and these would support greater costs associated with small scale manufacture. Examples of this include auxiliary power generation on yachts and military applications.

The Industrial Doctorate Centre in Molecular Modelling and Materials Science (M3S) at University College London (UCL) trains researchers in materials science and simulation of industrially important applications. As structural and physico-chemical processes at the molecular level largely determine the macroscopic properties of any material, quantitative research into this nano-scale behaviour is crucially important to the design and engineering of complex functional materials. The M3S IDC is a highly multi-disciplinary 4-year EngD programme, which works in partnership with a large base of industrial sponsors on a variety of projects ranging from catalysis to thin film technology, electronics, software engineering and bio-physics research. The four main research themes within the Centre are 1) Energy Materials and Catalysis; 2) Information Technology and Software Engineering; 3) Nano-engineering for Smart Materials; and 4) Pharmaceuticals and Bio-medical Engineering. These areas of research align perfectly with EPSRC's mission programmes: Energy, the Digital Economy, and Nanoscience through Engineering to Application. In addition, per definition an industrial doctorate centre is important to EPSRC's priority areas of Securing the Future Supply of People and Towards Better Exploitation. Students at the M3S IDC follow a tailor-made taught programme of specialist technical courses, as well as professionally accredited project management courses and transferable skills training, which ensures that whatever their first degree, on completion all students will have obtained thorough technical and managerial schooling as well as a doctoral research degree. The EngD research is industry-led and of comparable high quality and innovation as the more established PhD research degree. However, as the EngD students spend approximately 70% of their time on site with the industrial sponsor, they also gain first hand experience of the demanding research environment of a successful, competitive industry. Industrial partners who have taken up the opportunity during the first phase of the EngD programme to add an EngD researcher to their R&D teams include Johnson Matthey, Pilkington Glass, Exxon Mobil, Silicon Graphics, Accelrys and STS, while new companies are added to the pool of sponsors each year. Materials research in UCL is particularly well developed, with a thriving Centre for Materials Research and a newly established Materials Chemistry Centre. In addition, the Bloomsbury campus has perhaps the largest concentration of computational materials scientists in the UK, if not the world. Although affiliated to different UCL departments, all computational materials researchers are members of the UCL Materials Simulation Laboratory, which is active in advancing the development of common computational methodologies and encouraging collaborative research between the members. As such, UCL has a large team of well over a hundred research-active academic staff available to supervise research projects, ensuring that all industrial partners will be able to team up with an academic in a relevant research field to form the supervisory team to work with the EngD student. The success of the existing M3S Industrial Doctorate Centre and the obvious potential to widen its research remit and industrial partnerships into new, topical materials science areas, which are at the heart of EPSRC's strategic funding priorities for the near future, has led to this proposal for the funding of 5 annual cohorts of ten EngD students in the new phase of the Centre from 2009.

Pulse tube coolers are small low temperature refrigerators that can provide cooling for electronic devices such as infra-red detectors, superconducting devices and gamma ray detection in homeland security systems. Temperatures as low as 10 K can be obtained with a single stage helium-filled pulse tube but 30 K would be more typical, as lower temperatures would use a multi-stage approach. Pulse tubes can be thought of as a Stirling cycle cooler that relies on a gas column to act as a displacer; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_tube_refrigerator. A reciprocating piston (the compressor) drives a flow through a regenerator into a tube (the 'pulse tube'); heat is rejected at the interface between the compressor and the regenerator, and heat is absorbed at the other end of the regenerator. The performance of the pulse tube can be improved greatly by connecting the pulse tube to a buffer volume through an orifice or inertance tube. As this can very bulky and have limited possibilities for control, there are advantages in having a warm-end expander (in effect an oscillating piston). This can be designed to respond to the pressure variation generated by the compressor, with a phase lag and amplitude determined by the system dynamics. The pulsating flow can be produced by a system of valves with a high pressure gas supply, but this approach can only operate at low frequencies (a few Hz) due to the operation of the valves. In most recent applications a reciprocating piston is used which can be either mechanically or electromagnetically driven, and these typically operate at between 30 and 100 Hz. As the gas needs to be free of oil and other contaminants (to avoid fouling of the regenerator and cold-end heat exchanger), then it is sensible to use an 'Oxford-style' compressor. The Oxford-style compressor was developed over 30 years ago for a Stirling cycle cooler and its key features are: * a spring suspension system that is radially stiff to provide accurate linear motion of a piston in a cylinder, * a small radial clearance between the piston and cylinder (of order 8 micron) so there is negligible leakage and no contact (so no wear). * an electromagnetic drive (originally like the voice-coil of a loudspeaker). More recently compressors with moving magnets have been developed at Oxford. A crucial step was the design of a compressor in EP/E036899/1 'Development of a Miniature Refrigeration System for Electronics Cooling' that used a moving magnet with a stationary drive coil. This leads to a cheaper, low moving mass system that can operate at high frequency - this not only increases the specific output, but also leads to lower seal leakage losses and resistive losses in the drive coils. The work to be undertaken in this project will use a design that has been developed from the refrigeration compressor. The simplest pulse tubes have a linear configuration (compressor, hot-end heat exchanger, regenerator, cold-end heat exchanger, 'pulse tube' volume). But these have the disadvantage of the cold-end being in the middle so a 'U' tube arrangement is used. However, there are flow losses associated with the 'U' bend that can be eliminated by a novel radial flow and concentric tube arrangement. This will be combined with a warm-end expander, and a single dynamic balancer to provide perfect balance of the pulse tube. Stirling cycle coolers, in general, have a better performance than pulse tubes, but pulse tubes are simpler and better suited to higher frequency operation. The latest moving magnet compressor motor is capable of high frequency operation. Furthermore, high frequency operation leads to lower compressor clearance seal leakage losses, since this power loss and the Ohmic power loss are essentially independent of frequency. Therefore a pulse tube operating at high frequency (say 90 Hz) will be more efficient than at lower frequencies and be more compact than a Stirling cycle cooler.

We propose CrowdDesign: a novel crowdsourcing-based design/evaluation platform that allows evolving design concepts with heterogeneous user groups, provides context-aware analytics and leverages end-users' creativity. A central notion in CrowdDesign is a designlet-a specific user interface design, such as a prototype of a heating control interface or a smart remote control, coupled with a simple user task (such as setting the desired temperature or choosing a channel). To ease the development of designlets, CrowdDesign will be built on top of Google Android's existing development frameworks and extend their high-level and flexible design environment in order to minimise coding efforts. A designer submits a designlet via the CrowdDesign platform, which then distributes it to thousands of volunteers who are using the CrowdDesign mobile app. This app then weaves designlets into an engaging workflow in the app, which will be designed to entice, engage and retain volunteers using a variety of social features and gamification elements. Usage data from participants tackling the prescribed task in the designlet is then provided to the designer via a web-based analytics platform. Contextual data gathered via on-board mobile device sensors will be provided to the designer in order to understand broad interaction contexts, such as whether a participant was standing still or walking when engaging with their design. CrowdDesign relies on intrinsic motivation to entice, engage and retain users. The fundamental problem this proposal is tackling is the difficulty of evaluating user interface designs in realistic use contexts with large representative groups of users. This is critical in order for designers to fully emphasise with end-users. Unfortunately it is also time-consuming and expensive to recruit participants for lab studies and such studies often fail to capture important design implications. CrowdDesign makes it easier for designers to perform rapid in-situ evaluations of new user interface designs based on primarily three observations: 1) a large subset of current user interfaces can be accurately modelled by commodity smartphones and tablets. For instance, such user interfaces are commonly used in a) mobile apps, b) interfaces for users with motor disabilities and c) home appliance interfaces, such as heating controls; 2) mature sensor frameworks enable us to automatically sense the context of use, which further helps designers emphasise with end-users; and 3) prior research has convincingly demonstrated it is possible to crowd source tasks to tens of thousand of users by relying on users' intrinsic motivations. However, prior research has not established the feasibility of interleaving a crowdsourcing platform with a user interface design process and has not attempted to make participants of the platform first-class citizens.

We, human beings, acquire information from our surroundings through our sensory receptors of vision, sound, smell, touch and taste -the five senses. The sensory stimulus is converted to electrical signals as nerve impulse data communicated with our brain. What is really intriguing is the communication network. When one or more senses fail (impairment), we are able to reestablish communication and improve our other senses to protect us from incoming dangers. Furthermore, we have developed the mechanism of "reasoning", effectively analyzing the present data and generating a vision of the future, which we might call our 6th Sense (6S). Is it possible to develop a 6S technology to predict a catastrophic disaster? Industrial processes are already equipped with five senses: "hearing" from acoustic sensors, "smelling" from gas and liquid sensors, "seeing" from camera, "touching" from vibration sensors and "tasting" from composition monitors. 6S could be achieved by forming a sensing network which is self-adaptive and self-repairing, carrying out deep-thinking analysis with even limited data, and predicting the sequence of events via integrated system modelling. This project is the first step towards developing a 6S technology for industrial processes by bringing together research expertise in process systems engineering, wireless communication network, robotic and autonomous systems. The 6S technology developed in this project could be further explored to a wide range of industrial and manufacturing processes.