The motivation for this proposal is that the global reliance on fossil fuels is set to increase with the rapid growth of Asian economies and major discoveries of shale gas in developed nations. The strategic vision of the IDC is to develop a world-leading Centre for Industrial Doctoral Training focussed on delivering research leaders and next-generation innovators with broad economic, societal and contextual awareness, having strong technical skills and capable of operating in multi-disciplinary teams covering a range of knowledge transfer, deployment and policy roles. They will be able to analyse the overall economic context of projects and be aware of their social and ethical implications. These skills will enable them to contribute to stimulating UK-based industry to develop next-generation technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and ultimately improve the UK's position globally through increased jobs and exports. The Centre will involve over 50 recognised academics in carbon capture & storage (CCS) and cleaner fossil energy to provide comprehensive supervisory capacity across the theme for 70 doctoral students. It will provide an innovative training programme co-created in collaboration with our industrial partners to meet their advanced skills needs. The industrial letters of support demonstrate a strong need for the proposed Centre in terms of research to be conducted and PhDs that will be produced, with 10 new companies willing to join the proposed Centre including EDF Energy, Siemens, BOC Linde and Caterpillar, together with software companies, such as ANSYS, involved with power plant and CCS simulation. We maintain strong support from our current partners that include Doosan Babcock, Alstom Power, Air Products, the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), Tata Steel, SSE, RWE npower, Johnson Matthey, E.ON, CPL Industries, Clean Coal Ltd and Innospec, together with the Biomass & Fossil Fuels Research Alliance (BF2RA), a grouping of companies across the power sector. Further, we have engaged SMEs, including CMCL Innovation, 2Co Energy, PSE and C-Capture, that have recently received Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)/Technology Strategy Board (TSB)/ETI/EC support for CCS projects. The active involvement companies have in the research projects, make an IDC the most effective form of CDT to directly contribute to the UK maintaining a strong R&D base across the fossil energy power and allied sectors and to meet the aims of the DECC CCS Roadmap in enabling industry to define projects fitting their R&D priorities. The major technical challenges over the next 10-20 years identified by our industrial partners are: (i) implementing new, more flexible and efficient fossil fuel power plant to meet peak demand as recognised by electricity market reform incentives in the Energy Bill, with efficiency improvements involving materials challenges and maximising biomass use in coal-fired plant; (ii) deploying CCS at commercial scale for near-zero emission power plant and developing cost reduction technologies which involves improving first-generation solvent-based capture processes, developing next-generation capture processes, and understanding the impact of impurities on CO2 transport and storage; (iimaximising the potential of unconventional gas, including shale gas, 'tight' gas and syngas produced from underground coal gasification; and (iii) developing technologies for vastly reduced CO2 emissions in other industrial sectors: iron and steel making, cement, refineries, domestic fuels and small-scale diesel power generatort and These challenges match closely those defined in EPSRC's Priority Area of 'CCS and cleaner fossil energy'. Further, they cover biomass firing in conventional plant defined in the Bioenergy Priority Area, where specific issues concern erosion, corrosion, slagging, fouling and overall supply chain economics.

The emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has caused huge concerns around the world, in particular because it is widely believed that the increase in its concentration in the atmosphere is a key driver of climate change. If the current trend in the release of carbon dioxide continues, global temperatures are predicted to increase by more than 4 degrees centigrade, which would be disastrous for the world. With the increase in world population, the energy demand is also increasing. Coal-fired and gas-fired power plants still play a central role in meeting this energy demand for the foreseeable future, even though the share of renewable energy is increasing. These power plants are the largest stationary sources of carbon dioxide. Carbon capture is a technique to capture the carbon dioxide that is emitted in the flue gas from these power plants. This proposal seeks to make a significant improvement in the methods used for carbon capture in order to reduce the total costs. Post-combustion CO2 capture by chemical absorption using solvents (for example, monoethanolamine - MEA) is one of the most mature technologies. The conventional technology uses large packed columns. The cost to build and run the capture plants for power plants is currently very high because: (1) the packed columns are very large in size; (2) the amount of steam consumed to regenerate solvents for recirculation is significant. If we can manage to reduce the size of packed columns and the steam consumption, then the cost of carbon capture will be reduced correspondingly. From our previous studies, we found that mass transfer in the conventional packed columns used for carbon capture is very poor. This proposed research is expected to make very significant improvements in mass transfer. The key idea is to rotate the packed column so that it spins at hundreds of times per minute - a so-called rotating packed bed (RPB). A better mass transfer will be generated inside the RPB due to higher contact area. With an intensified capture process, a higher concentration of solvent can be used (for example 70 wt% MEA) and the quantity of recirculating solvent between intensified absorber and stripper will be reduced to around 40%. Our initial analysis has been published in an international leading journal and it indicates that the packing volume in an RPB will be less than 10% of an equivalent conventional packed column. This proposal will investigate how to design and operate the RPB in order to separate carbon dioxide most efficiently from flue gas. The work will include design of new experimental rigs, experimental study, process modelling and simulation, system integration, scale-up of intensified absorber and stripper, process optimisation, comparison between intensified capture process and conventional capture process from technical, economical and environmental points of view. The research will include an investigation into the optimum flow directions for the solvent and flue gas stream (parallel flow or counter-current) for intensified absorber and the optimum design of packing inside the RPB. The proposal will also compare the whole system performance using process intensification vs using conventional packed column for a CCGT power plant. Based on this, an economic analysis will be carried out to quantify the savings provided by this new process intensification technology.

In many cases failure mechanisms initiate and propagate from the surface, including failure under corrosion, fatigue and wear. Critical to this is the surface finish (SF) and the surface integrity (SI). While surface finish has received much attention, surface integrity, a term used to describe the localised sub-surface region that differs from the bulk (residual stresses, plastic deformation, chemical changes, hardness, etc) has received much less attention. Traditionally people have used simple cross sections to examine the surface microstructure.In this project we will apply a suite of state-of-the-art methods to characterise as fully as possible the local microstructure in 3D across a range of scales. These include serial sectioning using a focused ion beam (FIB), mechanical sectioning and X-ray tomography. In the latter X-rays are used to obtain a 3D picture without mechanically sectioning the sample. Critical to the former methods are the means of removing material quickly and efficiently without introducing damage. Emerging methods to remove the damaged layer will be developed such that we can obtain EBSD, texture, chemical mapping, residual stress and insights into plastic deformation near-surface. This will lead to one of the best surface integrity assessment facilities in the world to support industry. In addition we will develop micromechanical methods to assess mechanical properties and corrosion and wear performance. In this way we will relate surface integrity to surface durability. This is critical if we are to predict and engineer surface performance. In addition to developing these metrology tools we will apply them to a set of industrial case studies including corrosion of stainless steel for the energy sector, the performance of thermal barrier coatings for the turbine engine sector, the wear performances of WC-Co coatings and nanostructured coatings. Further case studies will be identified by our industrial steering group.

This project seeks to investigate the potential for using waste materials within combustion systems within the UK in the future, and how the combustion of such wastes might affect the ability of a power station to respond to changes in electricity demand. The purpose is not to look at today's electricity system and systems of governance with respect to combustion of wastes, but to consider how a rational system would be designed that utilised all potential fuel streams (and takes into account that different wastes will contain different levels of trace elements, some of which may be quite minor). An important point is that many wastes are currently landfilled - meaning that both the energy content of the waste is lost and a bulky material ends up in landfill. Here, we will conduct experiments looking at emissions of trace elements during combustion and co-firing (with coal) of different types of "waste" materials (for example, wood from demolition sites), together with analysis of ashes produced. The results will then be used to generate models of power plants burning wastes, and used to determine whether, for the wastes examined, the most rational use of the waste is combustion in dedicated facilities or co-combustion. It is clear that some of the wastes we will examine currently fall within the remit of the waste incineration directive (though all will be non-halogenated). We will examine whether this is scientifically valid.

Nickel-based superalloys are particularly used in applications involving high temperatures and stresses, such as the critical gas-turbine blades and discs in aerospace and power-generation industries. The behaviour of short cracks in nickel superalloys is of particular importance for component design and life prediction, as a large proportion of service life is spent in the growth of small cracks before final failure. Due to the strong influence of local microstructure and heterogeneous stress/strain fields, short cracks are known to grow anomalously under fatigue and tend to exhibit high, irregular and scattered growth rates. The physical driving force for short crack growth is still not well understood yet despite intensive research effort, mainly due to the limited understanding of crack-tip behaviour. This proposal aims to investigate the fundamental deformation mechanism at the tip of a short crack for nickel-based superalloys under fatigue at a range of temperatures. The research will focus on the influence of evolving local plasticity, induced by dislocation dynamics at the crack tip, on short crack growth. The interaction between dislocation and material microstructure is the major source for heterogeneous plasticity and internal stress concentration, leading to initiation and growth of short cracks. Short crack growth testing in a controlled environment will be carried out to study the anomalous behaviour of short crack growth in these alloys under fatigue, which is the expertise of UoS. Temperature will be varied in order to observe the critical effect of temperature change on the slip behaviour near the crack tip. Following crack growth tests, post-mortem transmission-electron-microscopy analyses of crack-tip zone will be performed to reveal the detailed mechanisms for nucleation and multiplication of dislocations, pile-up and penetration of dislocations at phase/grain boundaries and the influence of grain misorientations on dislocation behaviour. In particular, match-stick samples will be extracted from the crack-tip fracture process zone of fatigue-tested specimens to allow in-situ measurements of crack tip deformation under fatigue, which are the established techniques at UoM. In this case, high resolution digital image correlation, with the assistance of grain orientation mapping and scanning-electron-microscopy imaging of gold remodelled surfaces, will be used to quantify shear strain in slip traces formed near the crack tip during fatigue loading. In addition, high energy synchrotron X-ray diffraction studies will be carried out to measure the elastic strain response and load transfer between different phases around the crack tip, which will provide insight regarding the penetration of dislocations into the gamma-prime precipitates. To physically simulate the material plasticity behaviour, a three-dimensional discrete-dislocation-dynamics (DDD) approach will be developed to model the interaction between dislocations and material microstructures, which is the strength of LU, based on experimental results. The DDD model will be interfaced with viscoplasticity and crystal plasticity models, and further applied to investigate the role of dislocation dynamics in depicting short crack growth. A multi-scale finite element method will be established for the crack-tip deformation analyses, which aims to identify a micromechanics-based driving force for short crack growth. Computational simulations will be thoroughly validated against local strain measurements (at both mesoscale and microscale), in-situ and post-mortem measurements as well as X-ray tomography of extracted match-stick samples. The ultimate goal is to deliver an efficient finite element procedure to predict short crack growth, with full validation against the experimental data, for end users.