Our ambitious aim is to make aerosols that are "biologically activated" with photosynthetic algae that can capture CO2 from industry. Steelmaking is critical to everyone's lives in everything from the containers for food we eat to the cars we drive and the buildings in which we live. Over 1.8 bn tonnes of steel are produced annually to maintain our modern lifestyles: we cannot live without steelmaking, yet it is arguably twice as much about making CO2 as it is about making steel (approximately 2 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of steel). Each Blast Furnace has the same carbon footprint of around 350,000 people and there are some 900 furnaces globally. Steelmaking is thought to consume 8% of the world's energy. These facts make steelmaking a major contributor to climate change. There is a nascent strategy within UK steelmaking to pioneer the capture of their CO2 using biological engineering, with small-scale pilots taking place at our collaborator's site in Port Talbot. Although biological CO2 fixation provides a potential solution to capture carbon as well as produce a biomass resource, the associated efficiencies and costs are currently prohibitive. For example, if scaled up, current algal-based CO2-capture technology would require multiple football pitch size tanks to have a significant impact upon CO2 emission from a typical Blast Furnace. Hence, a completely new way of administering biological carbon fixation is required. We are aware of three separate fundamental aspects that have provided inspiration for our proposed solution. Firstly, a very recent study used empirical evidence and modelling to link the generation of a mega-algal bloom to 715 million tonnes of CO2 produced during a wildfire event off the coast of Australia. This means, CO2 capture at high scales is possible in the natural environment. Secondly, we know that bio-aerosols exist in nature, where bacteria can be transported over long distances- although this work has been undertaken largely to look at pathogen transport. There has been work to show that respiratory illnesses might be linked to toxins from cyanobacteria blooms for oceans and lakes. This then provides a link to the current dust capture technology used at Port Talbot during steel manufacturing: aerosols. We propose to repurpose our "Optomec AJ300" £0.5 M printed electronics machine and use its ink chambers to "atomise" microalgae into aerosols. These chambers become laboratories for our studies of the interaction between aerosol algae and gasses. The chambers have optical access for hyperspectral imaging and gas sensing. The printing afforded by the machine will allow efficient recovery of the aerosols "printing" them onto glass slides or any other substrate we desire, for further study. The work proposed is very high risk, as we do not know the parameters that would enable microalgae to survive the aerosolization process, what strains to use, how long they would be able to fix CO2 etc. However, if successful, the potential reward is high- as "biologically activated" aerosols could be used beyond CO2 capture, targeting others gases, volatile organic compounds and even warfare agents.

The metals industry is a vital part of the UK economy directly contributing >£10bn to the UK GDP and employing thousands of people. In particular, as the only metal produced and consumed in volume in the UK, steel is a foundation industry underpinning the UK economy. The microstructure of a steel dictates its functional and structural properties, with thermal processing being a critical factor governing the microstructure. Therefore, the ability to measure changes in microstructure at high temperature is critical to researchers in this area and important concern for steel manufacturers and component producers. Our previous collaborative work led to commercial sensors such as EMspecTM, which is used to monitor transformation in the hot strip mill, where the strip above the sensor is at temperatures up to 800 degree C, but the sensor is kept at room temperature in a water cooled jacket. In this proposal, we will make the next big step: to realise a new suite of electromagnetic instrumentation for measuring the properties of metal samples and products dynamically during thermal processing, with THE SENSORS THEMSELVES operating in the high temperature environment. This will create a suite of lab tools fitting inside furnaces that have not been available before for characterising steel at high temperatures, complementary to current dilatometry and calorimetry, which measure volumetric and thermic changes. Some important microstructural changes such as those associated with small enthalpy and/or length changes (e.g. recovery and recrystallisation events, tempering of martensitic steels) could potentially be resolved where DSC and DSD are hard to resolve. Furthermore, the instrument can potentially become a new routinely used tool in full scale metal production, e.g., on continuous annealing production lines (CAPL) or batch annealing furnaces to enhance product quality control and energy efficient operation of these processes.

In the UK, heat accounts for over a third of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. Most of the heating and cooling in our industries and buildings are delivered directly or indirectly by fossil fuels. Apart from the greenhouse emissions, the extensive consumption of fossil fuels can also lead to a large depletion of energy resources, waste heat production and pollution to the surrounding environment. To meet the target of Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, there is an urgent need for decarbonising heating and cooling by utilising renewable energy and industrial waste heat with advanced technologies. Compared to renewable energy such as solar, the resources from industrial waste heat have clear advantages including greater stabilisation, less cost and larger temperature ranges. Therefore, industrial waste heat recovery for decarbonised heating and cooling is an attractive concept that could simultaneously reduce fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Evidently, in the UK, based on a recent report, it was identified that around 48 TWh/yr industrial waste heat sources were available of which about 28 TWh/yr could be potentially used to meet the heating and cooling demands. All heat-intensive industrial sectors including iron & steel, refineries, ceramics, glass, cement, chemicals, food and drink, paper and pulp can contribute to this potential. Even so, high efficient energy conversion systems need to be designed and applied so as to maximize the waste heat utilisations for heating and cooling. On the other hand, the locations of industrial waste heat providers such as steel plants are mostly far away from the utilisers for heating and cooling. Conventionally, hot water heated by the industrial waste heat is transported through long distance water pipe to the end user site which can cause huge pump power consumption and heat losses due to significant friction pressure drop for the water flow and large temperature difference between water flow and ambient. There are therefore challenges to the long-distance waste heat transport and high-efficient and innovative energy conversion technologies for the decarbonising heating and cooling. To address these challenges, in this proposal, strategies for a novel concept of decarbonising district heating and cooling system (H2-heat) will be developed with the integration of metal hydride (MH) heat pump on site, long distance hydrogen and heat transport, and MH heating and cooling for end users. In such a system, low grade heat (~210C) and extra low grade heat (~40C) from TATA Steel plant or a similar industry site will be used as heat sources while building heating and cooling spaces are applied as heat sink and low temperature heat source respectively at end user side. Technologies of MH heat pump, a thermal driven chemical compressor with MH, long distance hydrogen and heat transport, MH space heating and cooling, MH alloys and reactors applied in the systems and processes, controls for space heating and cooling etc. will be identified and investigated. Ultimately, a decarbonising district heating and cooling test system with industrial waste heat from TATA Steel plant or other industrial sites will be constructed in lab with 5 kWth heating or cooling capacity and high heat transport efficiency. Furthermore, a detailed mathematical model will be developed and validated for the established system; this can be used for a system scale-up into actual application in TATA Steel plant or other industrial sites where low grade waste heat is available. As yet, no research activity on such a system can be found either nationally or internationally. Important reasons include the difficulty in choosing a thermal driven long distance hydrogen and heat transport system and associated MH alloys for space heating and cooling and complicated designs of MH reactors in the H2-heat system. These challenges and issues will be addressed and solved by this proposed project.

To counter significant levels of climate change and biodiversity loss, the UK and numerous other countries have set targets for "net-zero" greenhouse gas emissions. Rapid reductions in the built environment are crucial, since it drives 42% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. To achieve net-zero carbon buildings, we must reduce both: 1. OPERATIONAL CARBON - the emissions caused by a building's operational use 2. EMBODIED CARBON - the emissions caused by 'everything else', such as the manufacturing of materials, transportation to site, onsite construction, refurbishment, and disposal. Given the huge amount of construction required for new build and retrofit around the world, it is critical that embodied carbon is addressed, while we continue to tackle operational carbon. Indeed, the UK Government's 'Industrial Strategy: Construction Sector Deal' aims to halve the greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment by 2025, and to shift focus from operational to whole-life performance. Since May 2019, over 1,000 architecture and engineering practices have committed to reducing both embodied and operational carbon (these are together referred to as whole-life carbon; WLC). The Royal Institute of British Architects has set WLC targets for 2030 and 2050 in its 'Climate Challenge', and the new London Plan will require all 'referable planning applications' to calculate and reduce WLC. However, there are persistent challenges to predicting embodied (and therefore whole-life) carbon, and thus minimising it in practice. In particular, uncertainty is typically ignored. At the levels of individual construction products and whole buildings, models are typically deterministic in nature, producing single-point estimates of WLC. In practice, it is then unclear how confident designers and engineers can be that one option will be lower-carbon than another. In other scientific disciplines, probabilistic approaches are more common, producing results with confidence intervals and using statistical significance tests when making comparisons. Such rigour is now essential for predicting the WLC of buildings, to ensure that low-carbon design intentions are achieved in reality. This research therefore aims to significantly improve the treatment of uncertainty when predicting the WLC of construction products and whole buildings. We will work with project partners across the supply-chain of low-carbon buildings, including product manufacturing, low-carbon policy, and the design of structures and buildings. At product level, we will improve the treatment and communication of uncertainty in Environmental Product Declarations. At building level, we will develop and test a probabilistic approach for predicting whole life carbon through the design process. To achieve impact, we will engage international initiatives and standards that will define industry practice into the future.

Steel buildings form the vast majority of multi-storey and industrial buildings in the UK. More than 85% of the structural steel in existing buildings is recycled at the end of their service life whereas less than 15% is reused. However, steel recycling is energy-demanding and contributes to the UK iron and steel industry being the largest industrial sector in terms of both energy demands and greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, there is a genuine need for cutting-edge technical innovations embedded in the circular economy that maximizes sustainable, efficient and low-energy reuse, rather than energy-demanding recycling, of structural steel. RESTOR is the first project of its kind to apply sophisticated non-destructive testing (NDT), machine learning optimization, and building information modelling to reuse structural steel in construction. At the end of the first lifespan of used steel members (e.g., beams, columns, braces), RESTOR will allow their material properties to be determined based on NDT measurements. RESTOR will optimize the repurposing of used steel members and validate their structural performance during their second lifespan. It will develop a new, validated and optimized state-of-the-art generative design tool that will create automated and optimized building configurations made of used steel members. The outputs of RESTOR will therefore enable sustainable delivery of the infrastructure projects planned as part of the post-COVID-19 economic recovery strategy.