Electricity infrastructure provides a vital services to consumers. Across the UK there are thousands of miles of overhead lines and other assets that are vulnerable to a number of environmental risks. Wind risks have caused more disruptions to power supplies in the UK than any other environmental risks. Despite their importance, the future risks associated with windstorm disruption are currently highly uncertain as the coarse spatial resolution of climate models makes them unable to properly represent wind storm processes. STRAIN will address two challenges for infrastructure operators and stakeholders who are urgently seeking to understand and mitigate wind related risks in their pursuit to deliver more reliable services: (i) Build upon state-of-the-art modelling and analysis capabilities to assess the vulnerability of electricity networks and their engineering assets to high winds. This will consider the impact of different extreme wind events, over different parts of the electricity network, the households and businesses connected, and also apply a model representing infrastructure inter-connections to understand the potential impact on other infrastructures that require electricity such as road, rail and water systems. (ii) Climate models provide very uncertain wind projections, yet infrastructure operators require an understanding of future climate change to develop long term asset management strategies. To provide the necessary information we shall work with the Met Office and benefit from new high resolution simulations of future wind climate using a 1.5km climate model. These simulations have proven capable of representing convective storm processes, that drive many storms across the UK, and have already proven that they better capture extreme rainfall events. These methods will be applied to a case study of an electricity distribution network. These are more vulnerable to windstorms than the high voltage national transmission network. STRAIN will therefore, by synthesising and translating cutting-edge research, provide electricity distribution network operators with a significantly improved understanding of wind risks both now and in the longer term. This will improve the reliability of electricity supply to UK consumers including other infrastructure providers reliant on electricity distribution networks, and reduce costs by enabling more effective allocation of investments in adaptation and asset management. Furthermore, it will help other infrastructure service providers better understand the impacts of electricity disruption on their own systems, and plan accordingly. The improved understanding of future extreme wind storms will provide benefits across an even wider group of infrastructure and built environment stakeholders.

Compared to many parts of the world, the UK has under-invested in its infrastructure in recent decades. It now faces many challenges in upgrading its infrastructure so that it is appropriate for the social, economic and environmental challenges it will face in the remainder of the 21st century. A key challenge involves taking into account the ways in which infrastructure systems in one sector increasingly rely on other infrastructure systems in other sectors in order to operate. These interdependencies mean failures in one system can cause follow-on failures in other systems. For example, failures in the water system might knock out electricity supplies, which disrupt communications, and therefore transportation, which prevent engineers getting to the original problem in the water infrastructure. These problems now generate major economic and social costs. Unfortunately they are difficult to manage because the UK infrastructure system has historically been built, and is currently operated and managed, around individual infrastructure sectors. Because many privatised utilities have focused on operating infrastructure assets, they have limited experience in producing new ones or of understanding these interdependencies. Many of the old national R&D laboratories have been shut down and there is a lack of capability in the UK to procure and deliver the modern infrastructure the UK requires. On the one hand, this makes innovation risky. On the other hand, it creates significant commercial opportunities for firms that can improve their understanding of infrastructure interdependencies and speed up how they develop and test their new business models. This learning is difficult because infrastructure innovation is undertaken in complex networks of firms, rather than in an individual firm, and typically has to address a wide range of stakeholders, regulators, customers, users and suppliers. Currently, the UK lacks a shared learning environment where these different actors can come together and explore the strengths and weaknesses of different options. This makes innovation more difficult and costly, as firms are forced to 'learn by doing' and find it difficult to anticipate technical, economic, legal and societal constraints on their activity before they embark on costly development projects. The Centre will create a shared, facilitated learning environment in which social scientists, engineers, industrialists, policy makers and other stakeholders can research and learn together to understand how better to exploit the technical and market opportunities that emerge from the increased interdependence of infrastructure systems. The Centre will focus on the development and implementation of innovative business models and aims to support UK firms wishing to exploit them in international markets. The Centre will undertake a wide range of research activities on infrastructure interdependencies with users, which will allow problems to be discovered and addressed earlier and at lower cost. Because infrastructure innovations alter the social distribution of risks and rewards, the public needs to be involved in decision making to ensure business models and forms of regulation are socially robust. As a consequence, the Centre has a major focus on using its research to catalyse a broader national debate about the future of the UK's infrastructure, and how it might contribute towards a more sustainable, economically vibrant, and fair society. Beneficiaries from the Centre's activities include existing utility businesses, entrepreneurs wishing to enter the infrastructure sector, regulators, government and, perhaps most importantly, our communities who will benefit from more efficient and less vulnerable infrastructure based services.

The resilience of building and civil engineering structures is typically associated with the design of individual elements such that they have sufficient capacity or potential to react in an appropriate manner to adverse events. Traditionally this has been achieved by using 'robust' design procedures that focus on defining safety factors for individual adverse events and providing redundancy. As such, construction materials are designed to meet a prescribed specification; material degradation is viewed as inevitable and mitigation necessitates expensive maintenance regimes; ~£40 billion/year is spent in the UK on repair and maintenance of existing, mainly concrete, structures and ~$2.2 trillion/year is needed in the US to restore its infrastructure to good condition (grade B). More recently, based on a better understanding and knowledge of microbiological systems, materials that have the ability to adapt and respond to their environment have been developed. This fundamental change has the potential to facilitate the creation of a wide range of 'smart' materials and intelligent structures. This will include both autogenous and autonomic self-healing materials and adaptable, self-sensing and self-repairing structures. These materials can transform our infrastructure by embedding resilience in the components of these structures so that rather than being defined by individual events, they can evolve over their lifespan. To be truly self-healing, the material components will need to act synergistically over the range of time and length scales at which different forms of damage occur. Conglomerate materials, which comprise the majority of our infrastructure and built environment, form the focus of the proposed project. While current isolated international pockets of research activities on self-healing materials are on-going, most advances have been in other material fields and many have focussed on individual techniques and hence have only provided a partial solution to the inherent multi-dimensional nature of damage specific to construction materials with limited flexibility and multi-functionality. This proposal seeks to develop a multi-faceted self-healing approach that will be applicable to a wide range of conglomerates and their respective damage mechanisms. This proposal brings together a consortium of 11 academics from the Universities of Cardiff, Bath and Cambridge with the relevant skills and experience in structural and geotechnical engineering, materials chemistry, biology and materials science to develop and test the envisioned class of materials. The proposed work leverages on ground-breaking developments in these sciences in other sectors such as the pharmaceutical, medical and polymer composite industries. The technologies that are proposed are microbioloical and chemical healing at the micro- and meso-scale and crack control and prevention at the macro scale. This will be achieved through 4 work packages, three of which target the healing at the individual scales (micro/meso/macro) and the fourth which addresses the integration of the individual systems, their compatibility and methods of achieving healing of recurrent damage. This will then culminate in a number of field-trials in partnership with the project industrial collaborators to take this innovation closer to commercialisation. An integral part of this project will be the knowledge transfer activities and collaboration with other research centres throughout the world. This will ensure that the research is at the forefront of the global pursuit for intelligent infrastructure and will ensure that maximum impact is achieved. One of the primary outputs of the project will be the formation and establishment of a UK Virtual Centre of Excellence in Intelligent Construction Materials that will provide a national and international platform for facilitating dialogue and collaboration to enhance the global knowledge economy.

SummaryThis project involves collaboration between three institutions, Huddersfield University and the Universities of York and Southampton with additional technical supervision from the University of Cambridge and Atkins Consultants Ltd. The project concept arose out of the EPSRC Ideas Factory 'A Noisy Future? Making the World sound better', January 2006. There are three related themes with associated work packages: acoustic source recognition and characterisation, source localisation using networks, and instrument applications. The output of the three themes is combined in a fourth work package which is the development of the instrument itself. A fifth work package deals specifically with liaison between the team members and with the external supervision.

This proposal sets out the terms for the continuation funding for the IMRC at Imperial College. All objectives, research plans and beneficiaries information has previously been approved though the 3rd year review of the existing Centre.