Leeds Beckett University (Leeds Beckett) partnered with two universities in Brazil, Universidade Federal do Para (UFPA) and Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP) to organise student and staff mobility.With USP the mobility for academic staff looking at events management specifically for protest and social decent and with UFPA there was staff and student mobility in both directions from colleagues from a range of departments but all concerned with the accessible potable water in the Amazon area the implications for local communities and businesses.Both partnerships we pre-existing and allowed all participation universities to build on previous successes and widen the scope and impact of these partnerships the objectives having been to allow student mobility to enhance their personal, professional and academic development and to allow staff mobility to enhance their academic capabilities and increase knowledge, to undertake small amounts of teach and to further the collaboration in the subjects mentioned above. Seven students from undergraduate and masters level travelled to UFPA to undertake individual research projects for three months in a summer break so as not to disrupt their studies. The research directly contribute to their UK degree dissertations. The following year two students from UFPA (PhD and Masters level) to undertake research at Leeds Beckett and undertake practical lab work.Over the course of the 26 month project one Leeds Beckett colleague undertook staff mobility to UFPA and two colleagues visited Leeds Beckett from UFPA one being an academic and the other having both academic and non-academic roles. Two academic colleagues from Leeds Beckett undertook two visits each to USP and one academic colleague visited Leeds Beckett from USP.Overall 17 mobilities out of 20 awarded were successfully completed, the discrepancy manly being due to the difficulty for the Brazilian colleagues and students to visit the UK in the form of the cost of flights from UFPA in particular being expensive and the high cost of living in the UK. For outbound participants the motilities needed to be shorter than had been originally planned but this meant we were able to use the funding to send more student that we had expected.There were problems that had to be overcome, mainly logistical and practical ones, but overall the project was deemed an resounding success both in terms of what was achieved, valuable experiences to inform future international work and in various strands of continuing and future collaboration. Although participation was lower that had been anticipated, all objectives were met and in many ways expectations were exceeded. Successes include:-tangible enhancements to teaching and research methodologies through knowledge gained through the mobilities with UFPA but especially with USP-teaching delivered to staff and students at partner institutions-one participant from UFPA gaining funding for her post-doc at Leeds Beckett as a result of her mobility-personal and academic benefits to student participants in terms of skills gained (adaptability, organisational skills, communication skills), intercultural immersions, language skills and the opportunity to have academic and lab experiences that would have otherwise been impossible-the increased confidence on the part of Leeds Beckett and UFPA to seek other Erasmus+ funding-the ability to further existing collaboration that had started through other funding that has since ceased and to build on successes-successful and innovative international dissemination events using Skype-the publication of two papers and several more currently in progress-the replication of UFPA rainwater collection technology at Leeds Beckett to allow for further collaboration in research and teaching.All partners are committed to continue collaboration in various ways both within (funding permitting) and outside of the Erasmus+ programme.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at www.rcuk.ac.uk/StudentshipTerminology. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

In safety-critical systems, such as nuclear power plants, the demand for reliability, safety and fault tolerance is high. Faults compromise plant safety, cause inefficiencies in the operation of industrial processes and reduce component life. In such safety-critical systems, it is useful to design control systems which are capable of tolerating potential faults to improve the reliability and availability while providing a desirable performance. A control system which can automatically tolerate component malfunctions, while maintaining desirable performance and stability properties is said to be a fault-tolerant control system Fault tolerant control approaches allow control systems to operate under fault conditions with minimal degradation of performance and stability, preventing localised, random, or intentional faults from developing into catastrophic system failures leading to accidents that may have severe consequences to human life, equipment, infrastructure, or the environment. Fault tolerance helps to reduce the damaging effects that faults can have while remedial action is taken to repair or eliminate the fault. The proposed work will develop a hierarchical fault-tolerant control scheme for PWR nuclear power plants which will be defined over three levels: execution, coordination and management levels. The execution level, which includes the reactor, steam generator and turbine, implements the control actions generated by the higher levels through actuators, senses relevant plant variables, and passes this information to the higher levels. The middle level acts as a coordinator between the plant manager level and the execution level. To maximise its capabilities, the coordination level will include a bank of four different controllers that will be designed to tolerate faults of different severity, and there will be a mechanism to select the most appropriate controller given the circumstances of the plant as required by the management level. The coordination level also contains a diagnostic and prognostic system, which will the plant data and knowledge about the useful life of components to detect and characterise sensor related and other plant faults. The top level manages plant performance monitoring, plant condition evaluation, and passes commands to the coordination level. In addition, the management level transmits operational data to and receives instructions from a central command, control, and communication system which interfaces with human operators. The project will also involve the development of a nuclear plant simulator which will be used to test in real-time the hierarchical fault tolerant control scheme to be developed and implemented, to generate data about the behaviour of the plant under normal and fault conditions, and to generate simplified models of the plant, or parts of the plant, to be used for the purposes of controller design. The real-time tests will permit to assess the developments in a computational environment that is close to what would be encountered on a real plant, hence ensuring that the control methods to be developed are as realistic as possible. The work will be carried out in collaboration with Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, an Indian research institution that specialises in nuclear energy, and will benefit from the involvement of STS Nuclear, a UK organisation that specialises in nuclear safety management and training.

This is a project for higher education student and staff mobility between Programme Countries and Partner Countries. Please consult the website of the organisation to obtain additional details.

The re-invention of library space, as well as of the library as 'place', to reflect the changing expectations and demands of users in an age of rapid developments in society and in information and communication technology (ICT) has become a major consideration for librarians and library strategists. Policy and practice are best formulated when informed by the past. However, policy and practice in contemporary library design, certainly in Britain, have proceeded without the benefit of any major historical treatment of the subject. The issue of public library building renovation has received little attention in terms of serious research.\n\nThis application arises directly from the AHRB/C approved project 'Early British Public Library Buildings: Origins, Condition and Future Roles' whose three-year term is set to finish on 31 December 2006 (co-researcher on the project, Professor Simon Pepper (School of Architecture and Building Engineering, Liverpool University). The project set out to provide both a socio-architectural history of British public library buildings and an evaluation of their potential for modernization. The intention is for us to work together closely in the first half of 2007 to complete a book, with the working title Books, Buildings and Social Engineering: The Architectural Past and Future of Pre-1939 Public Libraries in Britain.\n\nThe project has evolved, as planned, in three phases:\n\n1. An initial survey was designed to identify and classify surviving British library buildings originating between 1850 and 1939. The survey is now complete. The resulting database contains information on approximately 1000 early public library buildings. It provides a working tool for the selection of buildings which justify further study in detail, either from a historical standpoint, or as case studies of effective modernization to satisfy contemporary needs and standards.\n2. The survey described above has formed the basis of the second phase of the project: a socio-architectural history of an important Victorian and early-twentieth century civic institution with ambitious social objectives and an iconography to support them. \n3. In the final phase of the project we have researched, and will continue to research in its final months, public attitudes to pre-1939 public library buildings and the difficulties that these buildings pose for library planners. Public attitudes have been captured in a survey by the Mass Observation Archive in late 2005, commissioned by the project team. Case studies of schemes to upgrade and modernize historic library buildings to meet the present needs of service providers and users are being conducted. \n\nThe evidence from this research now needs to be the subject of a final analysis, organization and dissemination. The main means of dissemination is a group-authored book, with Simon Pepper (3 chapters) and our research officer, Kaye Bagshaw (1 chapter plus gazetteer). I have responsibility for four chapters in the intended book. The first three are historical:\n\nCh. 1 (The Public Library and Society), which outlines the historical contexts of public library provision and the associated causes of library design.\n\nCh. 6 (Children's Libraries), which focuses on the development and causes of the design of children's departments from the 1890s to 1939.\n\nCh. 7 (Monument and Machine), which discusses the tension between library design aimed at monumentality and that which addressed utility / the library as 'machine'.\n\nThe last, Ch. 8 (The Way Ahead), examines the issue of current public and professional attitudes to, and treatment of, pre-1939 buildings, including renovated buildings.\n