Submarine landslides can be far larger than terrestrial landslides, and many generate destructive tsunamis. The Storegga Slide offshore Norway covers an area larger than Scotland and contains enough sediment to cover all of Scotland to a depth of 80 m. This huge slide occurred 8,200 years ago and extends for 800 km down slope. It produced a tsunami with a run up >20 m around the Norwegian Sea and 3-8 m on the Scottish mainland. The UK faces few other natural hazards that could cause damage on the scale of a repeat of the Storegga Slide tsunami. The Storegga Slide is not the only huge submarine slide in the Norwegian Sea. Published data suggest that there have been at least six such slides in the last 20,000 years. For instance, the Traenadjupet Slide occurred 4,000 years ago and involved ~900 km3 of sediment. Based on a recurrence interval of 4,000 years (2 events in the last 8,000 years, or 6 events in 20,000 years), there is a 5% probability of a major submarine slide, and possible tsunami, occurring in the next 200 years. Sedimentary deposits in Shetland dated at 1500 and 5500 years, in addition to the 8200 year Storegga deposit, are thought to indicate tsunami impacts and provide evidence that the Arctic tsunami hazard is still poorly understood. Given the potential impact of tsunamis generated by Arctic landslides, we need a rigorous assessment of the hazard they pose to the UK over the next 100-200 years, their potential cost to society, degree to which existing sea defences protect the UK, and how tsunami hazards could be incorporated into multi-hazard flood risk management. This project is timely because rapid climatic change in the Arctic could increase the risk posed by landslide-tsunamis. Crustal rebound associated with future ice melting may produce larger and more frequent earthquakes, such as probably triggered the Storegga Slide 8200 years ago. The Arctic is also predicted to undergo particularly rapid warming in the next few decades that could lead to dissociation of gas hydrates (ice-like compounds of methane and water) in marine sediments, weakening the sediment and potentially increasing the landsliding risk. Our objectives will be achieved through an integrated series of work blocks that examine the frequency of landslides in the Norwegian Sea preserved in the recent geological record, associated tsunami deposits in Shetland, future trends in frequency and size of earthquakes due to ice melting, slope stability and tsunami generation by landslides, tsunami inundation of the UK and potential societal costs. This forms a work flow that starts with observations of past landslides and evolves through modelling of their consequences to predicting and costing the consequences of potential future landslides and associated tsunamis. Particular attention will be paid to societal impacts and mitigation strategies, including examination of the effectiveness of current sea defences. This will be achieved through engagement of stakeholders from the start of the project, including government agencies that manage UK flood risk, international bodies responsible for tsunami warning systems, and the re-insurance sector. The main deliverables will be: (i) better understanding of frequency of past Arctic landslides and resulting tsunami impact on the UK (ii) improved models for submarine landslides and associated tsunamis that help to understand why certain landslides cause tsunamis, and others don't. (iii) a single modelling strategy that starts with a coupled landslide-tsunami source, tracks propagation of the tsunami across the Norwegian Sea, and ends with inundation of the UK coast. Tsunami sources of various sizes and origins will be tested (iv) a detailed evaluation of the consequences and societal cost to the UK of tsunami flooding , including the effectiveness of existing flood defences (v) an assessment of how climate change may alter landslide frequency and thus tsunami risk to the UK.

Public opinion on complex scientific topics can have dramatic effects on industrial sectors (e.g. GM crops, fracking, global warming). In order to realise the industrial and societal benefits of Autonomous Systems, they must be trustworthy by design and default, judged both through objective processes of systematic assurance and certification, and via the more subjective lens of users, industry, and the public. To address this and deliver it across the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme, the UK Research Hub for TAS (TAS-UK) assembles a team that is world renowned for research in understanding the socially embedded nature of technologies. TASK-UK will establish a collaborative platform for the UK to deliver world-leading best practices for the design, regulation and operation of 'socially beneficial' autonomous systems which are both trustworthy in principle, and trusted in practice by individuals, society and government. TAS-UK will work to bring together those within a broader landscape of TAS research, including the TAS nodes, to deliver the fundamental scientific principles that underpin TAS; it will provide a focal point for market and society-led research into TAS; and provide a visible and open door to engage a broad range of end-users, international collaborators and investors. TAS-UK will do this by delivering three key programmes to deliver the overall TAS programme, including the Research Programme, the Advocacy & Engagement Programme, and the Skills Programme. The core of the Research Programme is to amplify and shape TAS research and innovation in the UK, building on existing programmes and linking with the seven TAS nodes to deliver a coherent programme to ensure coverage of the fundamental research issues. The Advocacy & Engagement Programme will create a set of mechanisms for engagement and co-creation with the public, public sector actors, government, the third sector, and industry to help define best practices, assurance processes, and formulate policy. It will engage in cross-sector industry and partner connection and brokering across nodes. The Skills Programme will create a structured pipeline for future leaders in TAS research and innovation with new training programmes and openly available resources for broader upskilling and reskilling in TAS industry.

Offshore wind energy is becoming a major electricity provider with future expansion in deep water. Floating platforms can access water depths typically greater than 30 m, but have the disadvantage of platform motions due to combined waves and time varying thrust from turbine motion. Platform stabilisation is critically important for improving performance, reducing downtime and enabling safe access. Lost electrical output alone for a proposed 15 MW machine can be £20k per day at today's prices. Moreover, misalignment of the turbine axis with wind direction due to yaw and pitch causes power loss and undesirable blade stresses. In addition to pitch and surge in the wave direction, roll and yaw cross wave may occur due to multi-directional wave fields. Thus this project has two distinct aims both impacting on through life cost: Aim 1: to optimally minimise platform motion during power production by integrated (holistic) preview control of wave and wind effects on platform and turbines. A key reliability goal is to ensure acceleration at the nacelle due to pitch and surge is less than the recommended 0.2-0.3g, and to minimise damaging electrical surges and fatigue of structural components. Aim 2: to absolutely minimise platform motion for safe maintenance during personnel and material transfers by boat or helicopter and minimise debilitating motion effects on personnel during maintenance work. The illustrative case employed is the popular semi-sub floater concept which has comparatively shallow draft and simple deployment. Platform stabilisation will be achieved by combining: (i) pumped tank control between semi-sub columns to minimise pitch and roll as employed in ships, (ii) blade pitch control, already used in wind turbine control and (iii) yaw control for alignment with the wind direction. This multi-objective non-causal control problem requires future knowledge of both wave and wind forcing functions to achieve optimality.

The motivation for this proposal is that the global reliance on fossil fuels is set to increase with the rapid growth of Asian economies and major discoveries of shale gas in developed nations. The strategic vision of the IDC is to develop a world-leading Centre for Industrial Doctoral Training focussed on delivering research leaders and next-generation innovators with broad economic, societal and contextual awareness, having strong technical skills and capable of operating in multi-disciplinary teams covering a range of knowledge transfer, deployment and policy roles. They will be able to analyse the overall economic context of projects and be aware of their social and ethical implications. These skills will enable them to contribute to stimulating UK-based industry to develop next-generation technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and ultimately improve the UK's position globally through increased jobs and exports. The Centre will involve over 50 recognised academics in carbon capture & storage (CCS) and cleaner fossil energy to provide comprehensive supervisory capacity across the theme for 70 doctoral students. It will provide an innovative training programme co-created in collaboration with our industrial partners to meet their advanced skills needs. The industrial letters of support demonstrate a strong need for the proposed Centre in terms of research to be conducted and PhDs that will be produced, with 10 new companies willing to join the proposed Centre including EDF Energy, Siemens, BOC Linde and Caterpillar, together with software companies, such as ANSYS, involved with power plant and CCS simulation. We maintain strong support from our current partners that include Doosan Babcock, Alstom Power, Air Products, the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), Tata Steel, SSE, RWE npower, Johnson Matthey, E.ON, CPL Industries, Clean Coal Ltd and Innospec, together with the Biomass & Fossil Fuels Research Alliance (BF2RA), a grouping of companies across the power sector. Further, we have engaged SMEs, including CMCL Innovation, 2Co Energy, PSE and C-Capture, that have recently received Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)/Technology Strategy Board (TSB)/ETI/EC support for CCS projects. The active involvement companies have in the research projects, make an IDC the most effective form of CDT to directly contribute to the UK maintaining a strong R&D base across the fossil energy power and allied sectors and to meet the aims of the DECC CCS Roadmap in enabling industry to define projects fitting their R&D priorities. The major technical challenges over the next 10-20 years identified by our industrial partners are: (i) implementing new, more flexible and efficient fossil fuel power plant to meet peak demand as recognised by electricity market reform incentives in the Energy Bill, with efficiency improvements involving materials challenges and maximising biomass use in coal-fired plant; (ii) deploying CCS at commercial scale for near-zero emission power plant and developing cost reduction technologies which involves improving first-generation solvent-based capture processes, developing next-generation capture processes, and understanding the impact of impurities on CO2 transport and storage; (iimaximising the potential of unconventional gas, including shale gas, 'tight' gas and syngas produced from underground coal gasification; and (iii) developing technologies for vastly reduced CO2 emissions in other industrial sectors: iron and steel making, cement, refineries, domestic fuels and small-scale diesel power generatort and These challenges match closely those defined in EPSRC's Priority Area of 'CCS and cleaner fossil energy'. Further, they cover biomass firing in conventional plant defined in the Bioenergy Priority Area, where specific issues concern erosion, corrosion, slagging, fouling and overall supply chain economics.

Ductile materials, like metals and alloys, are widely used in engineering structures either by themselves or as reinforcement. They usually can sustain a lot of plastic damage before failing. Engineers understand quite well the ways that metals fail and how tolerant they are to damage, so efficient and less massive structures may be designed with well-defined margins of safety or reserve strength to cope with extreme events. By comparison, elastic brittle materials such as glasses and ceramics can fail without prior warning, so much larger safety margins are needed. Quasi-brittle materials are an important class of structural materials. They are brittle materials with some tolerance to damage and include concrete, polygranular graphite, ceramic-matrix composites, geological structures like rocks and bio-medical materials such as bone and bone replacements. Although their damage tolerance is much less than many metals and alloys, it can be quite significant compared to brittle materials such as ceramics and glasses. But this is not accounted for very well when engineers design with, or assess, quasi-brittle materials, as there is not an adequate understanding of the role on their damage tolerance of factors such as the microstructure of the material or the state of stress. Quasi-brittle materials are usually treated as fully brittle, taking little or no account of their damage tolerance, so assessments incorporate very significant safety margins, leading to designs that may be inefficient and unnecessarily bulky. Even when some assessment of damage tolerance is included, the microstructure can change as the material ages over time, and we need ways to measure the effects of this and to predict what it will do to the safety of the structure. This project aims to develop a method to predict the performance and evaluate the integrity of structures and components made from quasi-brittle materials. This will extend opportunities for their use in engineering applications, enabling more efficient design with greater confidence in safety. Quasi-brittleness is a property that emerges from the material's microstructure. A quasi-brittle material can be made from a connected network of very brittle parts (for instance, a porous ceramic). It exhibits a characteristic "graceful" failure as parts break locally when loaded sufficiently, which gives it damage tolerance. The "gracefulness" of the failure is affected by the random variations of strength and stiffness of the network and the form of the connections. Such networks represent a key part of the microstructure of the material, and to understand quasi-brittle fracture we need to construct models that properly describe the microstructure. There is a need to understand and define the mechanisms that control the fracture at the small and the large scale within these quasi-brittle materials. This will allow us to capture sensitivity to microstructure differences and degradation, and to produce general models that are suitable for the wide range of quasi-brittle materials and applications. Three-dimensional models that are faithful to the microstructure can be created using modern 3D microscopy methods, such as X-ray computed tomography. But these models are far too complex to simply scale up to structures very large relative to the microstructure. There is no computer than can do this, yet. We will develop modelling methods that sufficiently represent the complexity of quasi-brittle microstructures over a wide range of length scales, such as cellular automata finite elements. We will use advanced tomography and strain mapping techniques to observe how damage develops and to test and refine our models. We will then use this and the understanding that we gain to design new material tests and characterisation methods so that our methods may be used in a wide range of materials, from concretes to advanced nuclear composites, bone replacement biomaterials and geological materials.