Achieving carbon neutrality targets by 2050 is widely recognised as the most formidable challenge globally, whilst simultaneously a key opportunity to build a greener future for the next generations. Utilisation of renewable energy sources (e.g., wind, solar) is largely addressing the net-zero commitment on energy transition, but this will only address 55% of all emissions. Materials-based net zero, contributing to the remaining 45%, are more challenging due to the unavoidable utilisation of carbon products especially Carbon-containing Engineering Materials (CEMs) such as polymers, chemicals, and composites. CEMs are ubiquitous to industries but around 90% of these CEMs are produced from fossil resources. Even though alternative carbon sources (e.g., biomass, wastes, and CO2) and various decarbonisation pathways (e.g., CO2/H2-to-chemicals, power-to-chemicals) are currently under investigation, the criteria to systematically evaluate the carbon matrix comprising not just the carbon footprint but also the quality of carbon resource is lacking. This FLF will provide the evidence base to develop a carbon measuring framework by expanding the current carbon measuring matrix to not only quantify the carbon emission, but also embed carbon quality as a new dimension. Adopting this new framework, the existing net-zero technologies will be reassessed and new zero-waste solutions will be identified. The impact will be maximised by developing national/global material-based net-zero strategic guidelines that address the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 11-13 and guide future industry direction, policy making, and public acceptance.

Renewable energy generation as well as the electrification of both transportation (via electric vehicles) and space heating (via heat pumps) are regarded as the key enablers to achieve a net-zero circular economy by 2050. The Prime Minister's Ten Point Plan (November 2020) has set an ambition to grow the installation of electric heat pumps from 30,000 per year to 600,000 per year by 2028. However, the radical and complete replacement of fossil fuels (mainly natural gas for the UK) with renewable for heating will lead to significant 'capability wastes': (1) up to 150GW renewable electricity generation capacity will be mostly idle in other seasons rather than winter if superabundant renewable generation capacity was installation without inter-seasonal storage; (2) about 44GW conventional heat-to-power electricity generation capacity as well as the related infrastructure would be 'wasted' due to lack of carbon-free fuels. The 'waste' heat-to-power generation capacity is sufficient to meet the UK's electricity generation for heating in winters, considering their much higher load factor than renewable generation. One promising approach to tackle these challenges is the so-called 'Carnot Battery' technology, which is a grid-scale system primarily used to store electric energy with three key processes: transforming electricity into heat, storing the heat in inexpensive storage media, and then transforming the heat back to electricity when required. The 'Carnot Battery' is regarded as an emerging technology for the inexpensive and site-independent storage of electrical energy by turning the conventional power plants into grid-scale energy storage plants. However, current R&D efforts using this technology adopt either sensible thermal storage or latent heat storage and therefore are only suitable for short duration applications (e.g., daily/weekly energy management) due to unavoidable self-discharge (heat loss/dissipation). The overall aim of this project is to develop a novel and cost-effective metal oxides redox based thermochemical heat storage technology through the recovery of metallic material wastes, which enables the flexible capture of waste renewable electricity, as well as the timely power generation using otherwise retired thermal power plants. The whole process can realise the concept of 'Carnot Batteries' which could provide both short-term balancing and long-term inter-seasonal services to the grid.

The Circular Economy requirements and sustainability goals have been set out by the UK government and the United Nations to address the climate crisis and maintain our standard of living. The environmental impact from the global consumption of engineering materials is expected to double in the next forty years (OECD: Global Material Recourses to 2060, 2018), while annual waste generation is projected to increase by 70% by 2050 (World Bank What a Waste 2.0 report, 2018). A radical departure from traditional forward manufacturing is needed that no longer exclusively focuses on the original manufacturing process and the end of life dispose of manufactured products, parts, and materials. Processes are needed that will significantly prolong the useful life of engineering and especially critical materials (minerals with high economic vulnerability and high global supply risk e.g. rare earth elements for batteries, magnets and medical devices) by increasing the effectiveness of reuse, repurpose, repair, remanufacture, and recycle (Re-X) manufacturing processes. These Re-X processes are currently 3-6 times more labour intensive than traditional manufacturing processes. They are often not economic resulting in many engineering materials being disposed on landfill sites, degraded, or incinerated. UK businesses could benefit by up to £23 billion per year through low cost or no cost improvements in the efficient use of resources. The vision of this hub is to pursue an integrated, holistic approach toward creating a new manufacturing ecosystem for circular resource use of high value products through advances in AI and intelligent automation, empowering the UK to be a world leader in circular manufacturing. To deliver this ambition the hub will focused on two grand challenges: GC1: Radically transform the sustainable use of critical materials. (Goal: >75% Critical components reuse; >20% critical material use decrease; >50% component reclaim increase). GC2: Radically improve the productivity of Re-X manufacturing processes on par with or exceeding traditional forward manufacturing processes (Goal: >10 times improvement). To address these, the hub will establish a truly interdisciplinary team cutting across Manufacturing, Robotics, AI and Automation, Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Economics, and Life Cycle Assessment.?The hub will focus on three major fronts: Research excellence, community building and user engagement. The new research required to address the grand challenges and overcome the barriers and limitations preventing the transition to a truly circular manufacturing ecosystem will investigate: - New smart processes for disassembly, remanufacturing, separation, and recovery of critical products, components, and ultimately materials. - New sensing and analysis processes to track and determine the state of critical materials throughout their life. - New design methodologies for circular manufacturing. - New testing and validation methods to certify the remaining useful life of crucial products, components, and materials. - New circular Re-X business models. Our research programme will enable rapid scale up of Robotics and AI solutions that are compatible with sector practice, extensible via modular design, and can be repurposed initially in four flagship sector scenarios: energy, medical devices, electric drives, and large structures. Consequently, this Hub will directly address the 80% of the environmental impact of high-value products (Circular Economy Action Plan, European Union, 2020), and save more than 8M tonnes of CO2 emissions annually (HM Government Building our Industrial Strategy report, 2017).

The international offshore energy industry is undergoing as revolution, adopting aggressive net-zero objectives and shifting rapidly towards large scale offshore wind energy production. This revolution cannot be done using 'business as usual' approaches in a competitive market with low margins. Further, the offshore workforce is ageing as new generations of suitable graduates prefer not to work in hazardous places offshore. Operators therefore seek more cost effective, safe methods and business models for inspection, repair and maintenance of their topside and marine offshore infrastructure. Robotics and artificial intelligence are seen as key enablers in this regard as fewer staff offshore reduces cost, increases safety and workplace appeal. The long-term industry vision is thus for a digitised offshore energy field, operated, inspected and maintained from the shore using robots, digital architectures and cloud based processes to realise this vision. In the last 3 years, we has made significant advances to bring robots closer to widespread adoption in the offshore domain, developing close ties with industrial actors across the sector. The recent pandemic has highlighted a widespread need for remote operations in many other industrial sectors. The ORCA Hub extension is a one year project from 5 UK leading universities with over 20 industry partners (>£2.6M investment) which aims at translating the research done into the first phase of the Hub into industry led use cases. Led by the Edinburgh Centre of Robotics (HWU/UoE), in collaboration with Imperial College, Oxford and Liverpool Universities, this multi-disciplinary consortium brings its unique expertise in: Subsea (HWU), Ground (UoE, Oxf) and Aerial robotics (ICL); as well as human-machine interaction (HWU, UoE), innovative sensors for Non Destructive Evaluation and low-cost sensor networks (ICL, UoE); and asset management and certification (HWU, UoE, LIV). The Hub will provide remote solutions using robotics and AI that are applicable across a wide range of industrial sectors and that can operate and interact safely in autonomous or semi-autonomous modes in complex and cluttered environments. We will develop robotics solutions enabling accurate mapping , navigation around and interaction with assets in the marine, aerial and ground environments that support the deployment of sensors for asset monitoring. This will be demonstrated using 4 industry led use cases developed in close collaboration with our industry partners and feeding directly into their technology roadmaps: Offshore Renewable Energy Subsea Inspection in collaboration with EDF, Wood, Fugro, OREC, Seebyte Ltd and Rovco; Aerial Inspection of Large Infrastructures in Challenging Conditions in collaboration with Barrnon, BP, Flyability, SLAMCore, Voliro and Helvetis; Robust Inspection and Manipulation in Hazardous Environments in collaboration with ARUP, Babcock, Chevron, EMR, Lafarge, Createc, Ross Robotics; Symbiotic Systems for Resilient Autonomous Missions in collaboration with TLB, Total Wood and the Lloyds Register. This will see the Hub breach into new sectors and demonstrate the potential of our technology on a wider scale.