The Mission of Supergen Wind 2'To undertake research to achieve an integrated, cost-effective, reliable & available Offshore Wind Power Station.'This will be done under the four objectives:Reliability.Resource estimation.Scaling up of turbine sizes.Lifetime costs.The project will have two parallel Initiating Themes during the first two years. The first to deal with research into the physics and engineering of the offshore wind farm. The second to look more specifically at the wind turbine, building upon the lessons of Supergen Wind 1. In the third and fourth years of the project, the results of these two Themes will feed into a third Gathering Theme, which will consider the wind farm as a power station looking at how the power station should be designed, operated and maintained for optimum reliability and what the overall economics will be.

The EPSRC Centre in Coupled Whole Systems is a National Centre, hosted by Cranfield and Durham Universities. Successful high technology UK manufacturing companies are offering a range of interlinked high value products and services. High value products are typically technology intensive, expensive and reliability critical requiring engineering services (e.g. maintenance, repair and overhaul) throughout the life cycle e.g. aircraft engine, high-end cars, railway vehicle, wind turbines and defence equipment. Competitiveness is then dependent on many factors, such as design innovation for the product and added value through the services and minimisation of whole life cost. These products typically combine five major domains (structural, mechanical, electrical, electronic and software sub-systems) to achieve the required functionality and performance. These products are referred to as Coupled Whole Systems. The overall vision of the proposed EPSRC Centre is to develop knowledge, technology and process demonstrators, novel methodologies, techniques and the associated toolsets to provide the capability for the concept design of the coupled whole system based on system design for engineering services.After discussions with the industrial partners, KTNs and all the academics involved in the Centre, it has been decided that the Centre will start with a set of five projects. The projects are of three types, the first one identifies current challenges in the systems design across multiple sectors, the second set of three projects is in TRL levels 2-3 and addresses three major industrial challenges for engineering services across the sectors. This research will develop technology and process demonstrators, design rules and standards to evaluate the system design in order to reduce the engineering services cost later in the life cycle. The third type is more long term and represents TRL levels 1-2. This project will develop technologies that could reduce the need for maintenance and therefore reduce the whole life cost of a high value product. The five initial projects are as follows:Project 1: Study of cross sector challenges in coupled whole systems design (6 mths)Project 2: Reduction of no-fault found (NFF) through system design (3 yrs)Project 3: Characterisation of in-service component feedback for system design (3 yrs)Project 4: Improvement of System Design Process for whole life cost reduction (2 yrs)Project 5: Self-healing technologies for electronic and mechanical components and subsystems (3 yrs)All the initial projects and future ones will use the facilities of a Whole Systems Studio at Cranfield. The Studio will provide instrumentation and facilities to perform experiments in support of the initial and future research projects and develop technology and process demonstrators. The Studio will have a networked computing facility with a data highway based on the OSys integration platform. The platform will initially allow other facilities such as the 3D scanning facility from GOM, Electronics Lab from Durham, IVHM Centre at Cranfield and MRO Shop at Rolls Royce, Derby to be connected with the Studio. In future, other research groups and laboratories will be given access to the Studio as well.The core partners of the Centre are Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, Bombardier Transport, ARM and the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The partners represent aerospace, defence, railways and electronics sectors. There are 13 other industrial partners representing user companies from defence, information technology (IT), machine tool, and energy sectors and knowledge transfer networks (aerospace, energy and electronics), software vendor, media partner and trade organisations as dissemination partner to support the growth of the Centre.

An aerosol consists of solid particles or liquid droplets dispersed in a gas phase with sizes spanning from clusters of molecules (nanometres) to rain droplets (millimetres). Aerosol science is a term used to describe our understanding of the collective underlying physical science governing the properties and transformation of aerosols in a broad range of contexts, extending from drug delivery to the lungs to disease transmission, combustion and energy generation, materials processing, environmental science, and the delivery of agricultural and consumer products. Despite the commonality in the physical science core to all of these sectors, doctoral training in aerosol science has been focussed in specific contexts such as inhalation, the environment and materials. Representatives from these diverse sectors have reported that over 90% of their organisations experience difficulty in recruiting to research and technical roles requiring core expertise in aerosol science. Many of these will act as CDT partners and have co-created this bid. We will establish a CDT in Aerosol Science that, for the first time on a global stage, will provide foundational and comprehensive training for doctoral scientists in the core physical science. Not only will this bring coherence to training in aerosol science in the UK, but it will catalyse new collaborations between researchers in different disciplines. Inverting the existing training paradigm will ensure that practitioners of the future have the technical agility and confidence to move between different application contexts, leading to exciting and innovative approaches to address the technological, societal and health challenges in aerosol science. We will assemble a multidisciplinary team of supervisors from the Universities of Bristol, Bath, Cambridge, Hertfordshire, Imperial, Leeds and Manchester, with expertise spanning chemistry, physics, biological sciences, chemical and mechanical engineering, life and medical sciences, pharmacy and pharmacology, and earth and environmental sciences. Such breadth is crucial to provide the broad perspective on aerosol science central to developing researchers able to address the challenges that fall at the boundaries between these disciplines. We will engage with partners from across the industrial, governmental and public sectors, and with the Aerosol Society of the UK and Ireland, to deliver a legacy of training packages and an online training portal for future practitioners. With partners, we have defined the key research competencies in aerosol science necessary for their employees. Partners will provide support through skills-training placements, co-sponsored studentships, and contribution to taught elements. 5 cohorts of 16 doctoral students will follow a period of intensive training in the core concepts of aerosol science with training placements in complementary application areas and with partners. In subsequent years we will continue to build the activity of the cohort through summer schools, workshops and conferences hosted by the Aerosol Society, virtual training and enhanced training activities, and student-led initiatives. The students will acquire a perspective of aerosol science that stretches beyond the artificial boundaries of traditional disciplines, seeing the commonalities in core physical science. A cohort-based approach will provide a national focal point for training, acting as a catalyst to assemble a multi-disciplinary team with the breadth of research activity to provide opportunities for students to undertake research in complementary areas of aerosol science, and a mechanism for delivering the broad academic ingredients necessary for core training in aerosol science. A network of highly-skilled doctoral practitioners in aerosol science will result, capable of addressing the biggest problems and ethical dilemmas of our age, such as healthy ageing, sustainable and safe consumer products, and climate geoengineering.