The world's manufacturing economy has been transformed by the phenomenon of globalisation, with benefits for economies of scale, operational flexibility, risk sharing and access to new markets. It has been at the cost of a loss of manufacturing and other jobs in western economies, loss of core capabilities and increased risks of disruption in the highly interconnected and interdependent global systems. The resource demands and environmental impacts of globalisation have also led to a loss of sustainability. New highly adaptable manufacturing processes and techniques capable of operating at small scales may allow a rebalancing of the manufacturing economy. They offer the possibility of a new understanding of where and how design, manufacture and services should be carried out to achieve the most appropriate mix of capability and employment possibilities in our economies but also to minimise environmental costs, to improve product specialisation to markets and to ensure resilience of provision under natural and socio-political disruption. This proposal brings together an interdisciplinary academic team to work with industry and local communities to explore the impact of this re-distribution of manufacturing (RDM) at the scale of the city and its hinterland, using Bristol as an example in its European Green Capital year, and concentrating on the issues of resilience and sustainability. The aim of this exploration will be to develop a vision, roadmap and research agenda for the implications of RDM for the city, and at the same time develop a methodology for networked collaboration between the many stakeholders that will allow deep understanding of the issues to be achieved and new approaches to their resolution explored. The network will study the issues from a number of disciplinary perspectives, bringing together experts in manufacturing, design, logistics, operations management, infrastructure, resilience, sustainability, engineering systems, geographical sciences, mathematical modelling and beyond. They will consider how RDM may contribute to the resilience and sustainability of a city in a number of ways: firstly, how can we characterise the economic, social and environmental challenges that we face in the city for which RDM may contribute to a solution? Secondly, what are the technical developments, for example in manufacturing equipment and digital technologies, that are enablers for RDM, and what are their implications for a range of manufacturing applications and for the design of products and systems? Thirdly, what are the social and political developments, for example in public policy, in regulation, in the rise of social enterprise or environmentalism that impact on RDM and what are their implications? Fourthly, what are the business implications, on supply networks and logistics arrangements, of the re-distribution? Finally, what are the implications for the physical and digital infrastructure of the city? In addition, the network will, through the way in which it carries out embedded focused studies, explore mechanisms by which interdisciplinary teams may come together to address societal grand challenges and develop research agendas for their solution. These will be based on working together using a combination of a Collaboratory - a centre without walls - and a Living Lab - a gathering of public-private partnerships in which businesses, researchers, authorities, and citizens work together for the creation of new services, business ideas, markets, and technologies.

This proposal is for a new EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Wind and Marine Energy Systems and Structures (CDT-WAMSS) which joins together two successful EPSRC CDTs, their industrial partners and strong track records of training more than 130 researchers to date in offshore renewable energy (ORE). The new CDT will create a comprehensive, world-leading centre covering all aspects of wind and marine renewable energy, both above and below the water. It will produce highly skilled industry-ready engineers with multidisciplinary expertise, deep specialist knowledge and a broad understanding of pertinent whole-energy systems. Our graduates will be future leaders in industry and academia world-wide, driving development of the ORE sector, helping to deliver the Government's carbon reduction targets for 2050 and ensuring that the UK remains at the forefront of this vitally important sector. In order to prepare students for the sector in which they will work, CDT-WAMSS will look to the future and focus on areas that will be relevant from 2023 onwards, which are not necessarily the issues of the past and present. For this reason, the scope of CDT-WAMSS will, in addition to in-stilling a solid understanding of wind and marine energy technologies and engineering, have a particular emphasis on: safety and safe systems, emerging advanced power and control technologies, floating substructures, novel foundation and anchoring systems, materials and structural integrity, remote monitoring and inspection including autonomous intervention, all within a cost competitive and environmentally sensitive context. The proposed new EPSRC CDT in Wind and Marine Energy Systems and Structures will provide an unrivalled Offshore Renewable Energy training environment supporting 70 students over five cohorts on a four-year doctorate, with a critical mass of over 100 academic supervisors of internationally recognised research excellence in ORE. The distinct and flexible cohort approach to training, with professional engineering peer-to-peer learning both within and across cohorts, will provide students with opportunities to benefit from such support throughout their doctorate, not just in the first year. An exceptionally strong industrial participation through funding a large number of studentships and provision of advice and contributions to the training programme will ensure that the training and research is relevant and will have a direct impact on the delivery of the UK's carbon reduction targets, allowing the country to retain its world-leading position in this enormously exciting and important sector.

In recent years, the cost of energy produced by renewable supplies has steadily decreased. This factor, together with socio-economical reasons, has made renewable energies increasingly competitive, as confirmed by industry growth figures. Considering wind turbines (WTs), there are some interesting technical challenges associated with the drive to build larger, more durable rotors that produce more energy, in a cheaper, more cost efficient way. The rationale for moving towards larger rotors is that, with current designs, the power generated by WTs is theoretically proportional to the square of the blade length. Furthermore, taller WTs operate at higher altitudes and, on average, at greater wind speeds. Hence, in general, a single rotor can produce more energy than two rotors with half the area. However, larger blades are heavier, more expensive and increasingly prone to greater aerodynamic and inertial forces. In fact, it has been shown that they exhibit a cubic relationship between length and mass, meaning that material costs, inertial and self-weight effects grow faster than the energy output as the blade size increases. In addition, larger blades also have knock-on implications for the design of nacelle components. The wind-field through which the rotor sweeps varies both in time and space. Consequently, the force and torque distributions for the blades exhibit strong peaks at frequencies which are integer multiples of the rotor speed. Additional peaks are induced by lightly damped structural modes. The loads on the blades combine to produce unbalanced loads on the rotor which are transmitted to the hub, main bearing and other drive-train components. These unbalanced loads are a major contribution to the lifetime equivalent fatigue loads for some components which could cause premature structural failure. As the size of the blades increase, the unbalanced loads increase and the frequency of the spectral peaks decrease. Hence, they have an increasing impact as the size of the turbines become bigger. In this scenario, the demand for improvements in blade design is evident. The notion of increasingly mass efficient turbines, which are also able to harvest more energy, is immediately attractive. The viability of a novel adaptive blade concept for use with horizontal axis WTs is studied in this project. By suitably tailoring the elastic response of a blade to the aerodynamic pressure it could be possible to improve a turbine's annual energy production, whilst simultaneously alleviating structural loads. These improvements are obtained in a passive adaptive manner, by exploiting the capabilities that structural anisotropy and geometrically induced couplings provide. In particular, induced elastic twist could be used to vary the angle of attack of the blade sections according to power requirements, i.e. the elastic twist is tailored to change with wind speed proportionally to the bending load. The adaptive behaviour allows the blade geometry to follow the theoretically optimum shape for power generation closely (which varies as a function of the far field wind speed). This concept retains the load alleviation capability of previously proposed designs, whilst simultaneously enhancing energy production. Structurally, the adaptive behaviour is achieved by merging the bend-twist coupling capabilities of off-axis composite plies and of a swept blade planform. Potentially, an adaptive blade, controlled only by generator torque, could perform to power standards comparable to that of the current state-of-the-art-while greatly reducing complexity, cost and maintenance of wind turbines, by challenging the need for active pitch control systems.

By establishing imaginative synergies between academia and industrial partners, this project will provide leadership in public engagement and social interaction to inspire society by enhancing public appreciation of engineering research, to attract young minds to a fulfilling career in engineering and physical sciences, and to help underrepresented categories access education in STEM subjects. The scientific and technologic innovation coming from engineering and physical sciences is vital for boosting economic growth, improving quality of life and ensuring national security in the UK. To maintain and further enhance UK's international standing in the engineering sector requires higher education institutions to provide a pipeline of highly skilled professionals that can move between engineering disciplines with confidence and fluidity. Regrettably, schools and universities are not currently optimised to meet the demand of such high-skilled individuals, as the graduate-level shortfall is hitting the 20,000 people-per-year mark. A large untapped human capital is represented by women and minority ethnic groups. If the UK is to address its massive skill shortage in engineering and physical sciences, many more young minds need to be enthused and attracted to a career in engineering, and vigorous actions must be planned to involve underrepresented groups. To address these issues, we will design activities to demonstrate the breadth and importance of engineering research, to attract underrepresented groups to careers in engineering and physical sciences, and to facilitate stronger connections between schools and industry. The project will initially bring together Loughborough University and industrial partners BIAS Ltd, DNV GL, and TFM Networks. Other partners will be actively recruited during the project. This project will involve close engagement with schools and policymakers. The activities designed in the work packages will be tailored to support schools to achieve the relevant Gatsby Benchmarks. The Benchmarks were recently formulated by the Careers and Enterprise Company and define a framework of eight guidelines that schools should follow in order to offer top careers guidance to their students. We will make the project results accessible to policymakers in an engaging and influential way by writing a policy brief, which we will advertise on the project website and social media channels. The policy brief will enable Parliament to shape future policies to fill the engineering skills gap in the UK.

Tidal currents are known to have complex turbulent structures. Whilst the magnitude and directional variation of a tidal flow is deterministic, the characteristics of turbulent flow within a wave-current environment are stochastic in nature, and not well understood. Ambient upstream turbulent intensity affects the performance of a tidal turbine, while influencing downstream wake formation; the latter of which is crucial when arrays of tidal turbines are planned. When waves are added to the turbulent tidal current, the resulting wave-current induced turbulence and its impact on a tidal turbine make the design problem truly challenging. Although some very interesting and useful field measurements of tidal turbulence have been obtained at several sites around the world, only limited measurements have been made where waves and tidal currents co-exist, such as in the PFOW. Also, as these measurements are made at those sites licensed to particular marine energy device developers, the data are not accessible to academic researchers or other device developers. Given the ongoing development of tidal stream power in the Pentland Firth, there is a pressing need for advanced in situ field measurements at locations in the vicinity of planned device deployments. Equally, controlled generation of waves, currents and turbulence in the laboratory, and measurement of the performance characteristics of a model-scale tidal turbine will aid in further understanding of wave-current interactions. Such measurements would provide a proper understanding of the combined effects of waves and misaligned tidal stream flows on tidal turbine performance, and the resulting cyclic loadings on individual devices and complete arrays. The availability of such measurements will reduce uncertainty in analysis (and hence risk) leading to increased reliability (and hence cost reductions) through the informed design of more optimised tidal turbine blades and rotor structures. An understanding of wave-current-structure interaction and how this affects the dynamic loading on the rotor, support structure, foundation, and other structural components is essential not only for the evaluation of power or performance, but also for the estimation of normal operational and extreme wave and current scenarios used to assess the survivability and economic viability of the technology, and to predict associated risks. The proposal aims to address these issues through laboratory and field measurements. This research will investigate the combined effect of tidal currents, gravity waves, and ambient flow turbulence on the dynamic response of tidal energy converters. A high quality database will be established comprising field-scale measurements from the Pentland Firth, Orkney waters, and Shetland region, supplemented by laboratory-scale measurements from Edinburgh University's FloWave wave-current facility. Controlled experiments will be carried out at Edinburgh University's FloWave facility to determine hydrodynamic loads on a tidal current device and hence parameterise wave-current-turbulence-induced fatigue loading on the turbine's rotor and foundation.