The CDT proposal 'Fuel Cells and their Fuels - Clean Power for the 21st Century' is a focused and structured programme to train >52 students within 9 years in basic principles of the subject and guide them in conducting their PhD theses. This initiative answers the need for developing the human resources well before the demand for trained and experienced engineering and scientific staff begins to strongly increase towards the end of this decade. Market introduction of fuel cell products is expected from 2015 and the requirement for effort in developing robust and cost effective products will grow in parallel with market entry. The consortium consists of the Universities of Birmingham (lead), Nottingham, Loughborough, Imperial College and University College of London. Ulster University is added as a partner in developing teaching modules. The six Centre directors and the 60+ supervisor group have an excellent background of scientific and teaching expertise and are well established in national and international projects and Fuel Cell, Hydrogen and other fuel processing research and development. The Centre programme consists of seven compulsory taught modules worth 70 credit points, covering the four basic introduction modules to Fuel Cell and Hydrogen technologies and one on Safety issues, plus two business-oriented modules which were designed according to suggestions from industry partners. Further - optional - modules worth 50 credits cover the more specialised aspects of Fuel Cell and fuel processing technologies, but also include socio-economic topics and further modules on business skills that are invaluable in preparing students for their careers in industry. The programme covers the following topics out of which the individual students will select their area of specialisation: - electrochemistry, modelling, catalysis; - materials and components for low temperature fuel cells (PEFC, 80 and 120 -130 degC), and for high temperature fuel cells (SOFC) operating at 500 to 800 degC; - design, components, optimisation and control for low and high temperature fuel cell systems; including direct use of hydrocarbons in fuel cells, fuel processing and handling of fuel impurities; integration of hydrogen systems including hybrid fuel-cell-battery and gas turbine systems; optimisation, control design and modelling; integration of renewable energies into energy systems using hydrogen as a stabilising vector; - hydrogen production from fossil fuels and carbon-neutral feedstock, biological processes, and by photochemistry; hydrogen storage, and purification; development of low and high temperature electrolysers; - analysis of degradation phenomena at various scales (nano-scale in functional layers up to systems level), including the development of accelerated testing procedures; - socio-economic and cross-cutting issues: public health, public acceptance, economics, market introduction; system studies on the benefits of FCH technologies to national and international energy supply. The training programme can build on the vast investments made by the participating universities in the past and facilitated by EPSRC, EU, industry and private funds. The laboratory infrastructure is up to date and fully enables the work of the student cohort. Industry funding is used to complement the EPSRC funding and add studentships on top of the envisaged 52 placements. The Centre will emphasise the importance of networking and exchange of information across the scientific and engineering field and thus interacts strongly with the EPSRC-SUPERGEN Hub in Fuel Cells and Hydrogen, thus integrating the other UK universities active in this research area, and also encourage exchanges with other European and international training initiatives. The modules will be accessible to professionals from the interacting industry in order to foster exchange of students with their peers in industry.

Flooding caused by heavy convective rain is a serious problem in the UK. Flash floods in hilly terrain can be particularly damaging. The Convective Orographically-induced Precipitation Study (COPS) is an international project designed to address this problem and to improve predictions of heavy convective precipitation. This proposal is the UK component of COPS which adds specific objectives complementary to those of other COPS partners. It will produce an understanding of the processes that control the formation and development of convective precipitation over hilly terrain which will be used by scientists within the Mesoscale Modelling group of the Met Office in reducing uncertainty in predictability of convection over complex terrain with the Unified Model (UM). This will be achieved by synthesising COPS data alongside modelling activities focussed on interpreting the data. The problem involves five integrated parts that need to be tackled together. (1) The thermally driven flows in complex terrain depends critically on the surface exchanges of heat and water. (2) The composition and size distribution of the aerosol particles have a crucial influence on the microphysics and dynamics of the convective clouds and particularly the amount of precipitation. (3) The thermals and other features in the boundary layer that transport heat, moisture and aerosols to the convective clouds. (4) The development of precipitation depends critically on the detailed microphysics and dynamics of the convective clouds. (5) Finally, reducing uncertainty in predictability of the location and timing of convective storms in hilly terrain with the UM, depends on the knowledge gained from these four parts. In particular the relative contributions of different sources of uncertainty in predictability of convective storms in hilly terrain will be quantified, thus providing the basis for an ensemble forecast system.

Molecular framework materials (MFMs) are an emerging materials class that combines the immense richness of functionalities of molecules with the advantages of regular solid materials. High surface area, tuneable pore size and functional groups offer applications in fields such as gas adsorption and separation, catalysis and sensing. They are synthesised by joining metal clusters (nodes) with organic linkers. There are several dozen possible nodes of different shapes, and almost any organic molecule can be used as a linker resulting in a huge "Molecular Meccano" set for the creation of a vast variety of porous MFMs. Several interesting phenomena have been observed in these materials. Flexibility in the linkers themselves and their attachment to each node leads to breathing and gating behaviour in the materials, without destroying their crystallinity. Framework breathing, for example, can admit guest molecules that would not otherwise fit through pore gates. In a similar manner, small rotations of linkers can create / destroy ideal pockets for absorption of gases such as CO2 and H2. While fundamental to the behaviour of MFMs, this flexibility poses an inherent challenge to the development of these materials and as yet the fundamental atomistic understanding of the breathing phenomena is not at the stage where it can be employed to design these materials. This project will create a database of all known building blocks for MFMs and then use that database to determine degree and type of flexibility inherent in each building block. The flexibility in each building block can then be related back to the overall framework structures and used to design flexible MFM materials tailored for specific applications - e.g. to store energy (hydrogen or methane) or to separate and purify gas mixtures (such as helium in natural gas).

Wearable technologies such as smart glasses have recently caused much excitement in the business and technology spheres. However, these examples use relatively conventional technologies. The real breakthrough in wearable technologies will come when we can manufacture materials and components that are flexible and non-intrusive enough to be integrated into everyday items, such as our clothes. The main challenges to achieving this are the lack of reliability, performance limitations of (opto)electronics on flexible substrates, and the lack of flexible power sources. Much of the necessary device technology exists in some nascent form; our proposal will provide the technological innovation to allow its manufacture in a form compatible with wearable technology. In this project we aim to solve a key technological challenge in wearable technologies, namely that of scalable and cost-effective manufacturing by taking advantage of the following areas of UK technological excellence in components and scale-up technologies: 1) The assembled consortium has an emphasis on inventing and demonstrating the key wearables technologies required on flexible substrates for displays, energy harvesting and sensing. 2) The consortium consists of key researchers in the fields of modeling prediction, metrology, systems integration and design for reliability, all required to complement the device engineering. 3) Importantly, by integrating, right from the word go, the aspect of Roll-to-Roll (R2R) scale-up of manufacturing such flexible technologies, we will create the manufacturing know-how to allow fundamental science to translate into manufacturing. The deposition processes for all wearables face similar challenges such as low material yield, high waste (important for functional films where minimizing waste saves costs substantially) and lack of in-situ process monitoring. Additionally, for our targeted applications, there is currently no scalable cost-effective manufacturing technology. Roll-to-roll processing fulfills this crucial need and our aim will be to enable this scalable manufacturing technology for inexpensive production on flexible substrates, an area very much underexplored in terms of advanced functional materials, but one with huge potential.

Phase-change materials, such as GeSbTe or AgInSbTe alloys, exhibit some remarkable properties; they can be amorphized in femtoseconds and crystallised in picoseconds, yet can remain stable against spontaneous changes of state for many years. They show hugely contrasting properties between phases, including an electrical conductivity difference of up to five orders of magnitude and a large refractive index change; properties that have led to their application in electrical (phase-change RAM or PCM devices) and optical (DVD and Blu-Ray disks) memories. The origin of such remarkable properties has been a source of much recent research. Kolobov showed that, contrary to conventional expectations, the short-range order in Ge2Sb2Te5 is higher in the amorphous than in the crystal phase. This was explained by an 'umbrella flip' of Ge atoms from primarily tetrahedral to octahedral bonding in the amorphous to crystalline transition, and was put forward as the potential origin of ultra-fast switching. While this simple 'umbrella-flip' model has since turned out not to be a truly realistic model of the phase-transition, and cannot explain the behavior of phase-materials that do not contain germanium, it sparked a world-wide 'quest' for an accurate understanding of the nature of switching processes in this important class of materials. Part of the answer was revealed by the 'discovery' that the crystalline phase of phase-change alloys is also rather unusual, exhibiting strong resonance bonding, with such bonding being suggested as a 'necessary condition' for technologically useful phase-change properties. Most recently a metal-insulator type disorder induced transition in the crystalline phase has also been reported, and it has also been suggested that distortions in the crystalline phase may trigger a collapse of long-range order, generating the amorphous phase without going through the liquid state. The scientific and technological importance of phase-change materials is clearly extremely high. However, many of their remarkable properties remain poorly understood, and the ways in which such properties might be exploited to deliver exciting applications going way beyond simple binary memories is largely 'uncharted territory'. For example we have, very recently, shown that by crystallizing GeSbTe alloys using femtosecond optical pulses we can perform reliable arithmetic processing, so providing a form of 'phase-change processor', Furthermore, we showed that a fundamental advantage of phase-change materials over other common electronics materials is that they have readily accessible and usable electrical and optical responses, and signals can be transferred relatively simply between these two domains. This mixed-mode behavior of phase-change materials provides a (as yet unused) powerful means to understand the fundamental switching properties of these materials. There are also several potentially very important applications of mixed-mode behavior, such as ultra-fast optically-gated switching for example (or, more speculatively, optically-active memristors - or 'memflectors'). However, this mixed-mode behavior of phase-change materials has never before been explored. Our proposal therefore combines a new route to addressing key scientific questions that remain unanswered, along with an exploration of entirely new ways in which to exploit the remarkable properties of phase-change materials; specifically we ask: 1. exactly how fast are these phase-change (crystallization and amorphization) processes? 2. does amorphization always involve melting in phase-change materials? 3. what are the precise dynamics of switching events; are they different in optically-excited and electrically excited cases; do they remain the same on the nanocale? 4. what are the key materials drivers for ultra-fast switching? 5. can we scale mixed-mode behavior to the nanoscale? 6. can we exploit mixed-mode behavior to provide advanced functionality?