Nitrogen fertiliser is essential to sustain wheat yields but is also an important determinant of grain quality. This is because nitrogen is required for the synthesis of grain proteins, with the gluten proteins forming the major grain protein fraction. About 40% of the wheat produced in the UK is used for food production, particularly for making bread and other baked products. Wheat is also widely used as a functional ingredient in many processed foods, while bread wheat and imported durum wheats are used to make noodles and pasta, respectively. The gluten proteins are essential for these uses, providing visco-elastic properties to dough. Consequently, the content and quality of the grain proteins affect the processing quality, with a minimum of 13% being specified for the Chorleywood Breadmaking Process (CBP) which is used for over 80% of the "factory produced" bread in the UK. The requirement of nitrogen to produce wheat for bread making is also above the optimum required for yield, and farmers may apply up to 50 kg N/Ha above the yield optimum to achieve 13% protein (2.28% N). This is costly with nitrogen fertiliser contributing significantly to crop production, and may also contribute to a greater "nitrogen footprint" in the farmed environment. It may be possible to reduce the requirement for breadmaking wheats, to a limited extent, by optimising the efficiency of nitrogen uptake and use within the wheat plant. However, this will only have limited benefits and a more viable long-term solution is to develop new types of wheat and processing systems which will allow the use of lower protein contents for bread making. We will therefore identify types of wheat which have good and stable breadmaking quality at low grain protein. Genetic analyses of the trait will provide molecular markers to assist wheat breeders while studies of underpinning mechanisms will allow new selection procedures to be used to identify germplasm and select for quality in breeding programmes. We will also work with millers and bakers to establish optimum conditions for processing of wheats with lower protein contents.

As energy costs increase, and legislation to reduce carbon emissions are implemented, then existing processes that use significant amounts of heat become expensive; in the case of food production this results in higher prices to the consumer. This work will examine the heat use within three key stages of the baking process (i) proving (where dough is conditioned) (ii) baking in continuous ovens where dough enters on a conveyor and exits as baked product (iii) cooling where the bread is reduced in temperature over a period of 2 hours. This information will be used to guide a study where the potential for (a) reduction and (b) re-use of heat will be assessed. This will be through a two-pronged approach. Firstly a study will be made to retro-fit existing installations for heat recovery and reduction, for example using a 'heat exchanger' to capture waste heat in one part of the process and use it in another. The second approach will be to make a detailed study of the exact conditions within the oven using experimental measurement and computational predictions. The aim here is to establish the baseline conditions for baking, and then determine enhanced equipment setup and designs. The results of this work in the short-to-medium term will be optimised process lines, in the longer term it will guide future design work of ovens and offer better competitiveness to UK industries.

This programme brings together teams from Herriot Watt University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Westminster and Durham University: providing a multidisciplinary focus on the research needed to enable and underpin radical measures to decarbonise the UK's road freight transport sector. The researchers are augmented by a consortium of 22 industrial partners, drawn from users, suppliers and participants in the road logistics sector. These industrial members provide advice and guidance as well as a rapid route to prototyping and implementation of solutions. The first 5-year programme, conducted by the same team, laid the foundations and showed that radical measures are necessary to hit the UK Government's CO2 reduction targets. It also showed that integration between logistics solutions, vehicle technology, and policy measures is essential. This experience has shaped the design of the proposed programme. The new research programme will run for 5 years and has three themes: (i) data collection and management, (ii) logistics systems, and (iii) vehicle technology. A portfolio of 23 projects spans the themes. The first strand of projects (funded mainly by EPSRC), will focus on reducing barriers to promising strategic, deep decarbonisation technologies and solutions. These projects will create and integrate new data, new modelling tools and decision support systems, to create new insights about technological and logistical solutions, compelling arguments for their early adoption and recommendations for the necessary policy measures. Driven by a desire to model and then quantify the benefits of radical logistics options, the models will be developed and validated with data from real freight operations by the industrial partners, collected by novel automated means. Alternative vehicle fuels and power trains and ways of significantly reducing energy consumption will be investigated. The second strand of projects (funded mainly by EPSRC and industry) will focus on extending and optimising the capabilities of promising technologies and on increasing their impact when applied to decarbonisation of road freight. Applied research into the dynamics of logistics mode decisions and testing of novel logistics options such as horizontal collaboration, co-loading and reorganisation of logistics infrastructure, will be enabled by tools developed in the first strand. Technologies developed in the first 5 years of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight (SRF) will be tested in two separate full-scale field trials with consortium partners, funded by InnovateUK. Road-mapping will provide a mechanism for corporates, government departments and researchers to build a common view of the future. The projects in the third strand (funded by Energy Technologies Institute) will focus on implementation of tools and practices that offer immediate impact. These include novel and powerful software systems for industry to use in data collection and for vehicle characterisation and fleet decarbonisation. Research into the drivers of strategy and policy will, likewise identify the most powerful ways to influence adoption of technologies and logistics solutions. The Road Freight Systems Living Laboratory ('Living Lab') is the central integrating element of the SRF's five-year research programme. Almost every project in the Centre will be part of it. The Living Lab will provide a test bed to measure and model freight operations; to develop technical and logistical interventions based on real-time logistics data; to test the interventions in simulation; to develop decision support tools (several based on work done in the first 5 years of the SRF) and eventually to implement and trial the tools and systems in practice. The Living Lab will be based on an integrated software and data platform that is currently being built by the research team and industry partners.