This Fellowship will develop new approaches to verifying and validating sensor concepts for assessing the integrity and status of engineering products and systems throughout their lifecycles, in particular with respect to structural health management (SHM). Such condition monitoring technology is vital for health management of high value and safety critical systems and structures. No coherent approach for its verification and validation yet exists. Moreover, the ability to closely monitor engineering assets with increasing detail and pervasiveness offers a path to revolutionary new design concepts where health monitoring functionality can be incorporated into the fundamental manufacturing design philosophies. This fellowship addresses both of these themes. They are linked by the common need for completely dependable sensing throughout the life of the product. The Fellowship will help establish a strong academic career for the applicant while exploiting his knowledge and long experience at the heart of manufacturing industry and his unique expertise in research, development and validation of sensors for manufacturing applications. New approaches will be developed for efficiently validating emerging sensing concepts through experimental and model based methods firmly linked to the end-use and operational requirements. It will provide a framework in which devices and systems at preliminary stages of development can be 'road-tested' to aid decisions early in the device development. In addition, the impact of built-in sensing function on fundamental design principles and production/manufacturing techniques for selected engineering products will be explored and demonstrated at laboratory scale. In achieving this, the research will fill a perceived gap in the UK between technology focussed research in sensor techniques in universities and industrial R&D and the end user requirements and constraints. The Fellowship will act as a springboard for creating a new capability in the UK at Cranfield University for experimental verification and validation of condition monitoring sensors with multi-industry relevance. The Fellowship will allow creation of a novel body of scientific knowledge in sensor verification while drawing together many of the strands of current, ad-hoc industry and research experience. The capacity of in-built sensing to transform approaches to design and through-life sustainment of engineering systems such as safety critical structures will also be revealed and demonstrated as part the work. The five year research programme is intended to establish the applicant as an academic leader and will exploit his long experience in industry to influence and create new thinking within the university environment. His thought leadership exercised by interaction with the other EPSRC and IVHM centres at Cranfield as well as teching, will help bridge the gap between academic research and beneficiaries by linking user needs in respect of health monitoring technologies with the fundamantals of through-life processes from design and manufacture to life extension. It will generate further high quality research relating to through life engineering and manufacture.

Wind energy is one of the fastest growing sectors in the world's energy markets. According to the EWEA, the European wind market it is expected to grow consistently at a compound annual growth rate of 9.8%. As annual blade failures are estimated at around 3,800 with poor maintenance the most common cause of accidents, ensuring the integrity of blades is a key issue with respect to the business, safety and the environment. The overall problem envisaged is the lack of effective condition monitoring systems for the blades, representing a business opportunity for the project’s partners Hence, the Project aims to commercialize a novel solution, BladeSave, marketed as a fusion between a Fibre Optic Structural Health Monitoring System providing multi-sensing capability and a management software incorporating risk based inspection data analysis and offering a comprehensive solution for blade monitoring, repair and management. Based on existing technologies developed by the partners at TRL6, BladeSave will assist WFOs in satisfying newly imposed regulations by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (amendments to EN 50308) and benefit European ISPs in the CM services market, giving them a competitive edge over global rivals. Our product market target consists predominantly of the WTFs installed before 2011 (currently around 71,620 in Europe) as old wind turbines have an average annual maintenance cost larger than newer models, are not covered by warranties and offer a bigger risk of catastrophic failures. The project brings together five experienced companies with a unique set of skills and expertise in the wind industry. BladeSave will have an impact on both European and foreign markets, and over the five year sales projection, we forecast a total cumulative gross profits of at least €48 million, a return of EU investment of 23:1 and the creation of about 380 jobs within consortium and associated companies which are part of the supply chain.

Engineering structures made from advanced composite materials are usually connected together by bolts, rivets or pins to transfer loads between primary load bearing members. Although bolted joints are used quite extensively for this purpose they are still not well understood and there is no definite method to predict joint strength. The proposed research aims to look at holes and pin-loaded holes in composite components using thermoelastic stress analysis (TSA) to provide experimental data that will help improve the design of bolted joints. The work will also define the degree to which moulding holes in composite materials improves the strength of the component. A moulded hole is on in which the fibres of the reinforcing material of a composite is routed around the hole instead of being cut using a drill. A full scale test of a real engineering structure will be performed to demonstrate that the behaviour of a bolted joint can be predicted by the smaller scale tests on holes and pin-loaded holes.

This is a Consortium of 8 Universities and 1 Research Laboratory with expertise in wind turbine design, location & operation, aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, materials, electrical machinery, control, reliability and condition monitoring. The Consortium has the active support of 9 Partners with Industrial and Research experience, including wind farm Operators, Manufacturers & Consultants. The Consortium's objective is to investigate Wind Energy Technologies.The Management Hub is Strathclyde University, the Finance Hub is Durham University.The challenge facing the Consortium is significant encompassing the search for engineering solutions:1. To improve the efficiency and reliability of wind energy.2. To reduce the cost of energy production.3. To facilitate the siting of machines in off-shore locations.4. To reduce the impact on existing infrastructure.The interdependences of the challenges and the interdisciplinary nature of the work call for flexibility, imagination and careful co-ordination of effort from the consortium that includes experts in all the relevant engineering disciplines.We believe that the Consortium offers a unique opportunity in wind energy research. The EU Framework VI programme addresses renewable energy but concentrates on the demonstration of technology. In contrast, the Consortium will focus sharply on the technological challenges, particularly those related to the exploitation of the UK's extensive offshore wind resource. The Consortium will undertake some truly interdisciplinary research that is essential in a technology comprised of many different branches of engineering. The overall objective is to improve the acceptability and cost-effectiveness of large scale offshore wind energy development by 1. Investigating the reliability and availability of wind turbines and to modelling their failure modes in order to develop a predictive and proactive condition monitoring system.2. Assessing the potential design limits of large wind turbines via detailed understanding of technical developments in innovative materials and active load reduction.3. Developing new/improved methods for optimised siting and design of large wind turbines as influenced by wind flow, seabed movement, lightning and radar visibility.

The EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Additive Manufacturing will create a sustainable and multidisciplinary body of expertise that will act as a UK and international focus - the 'go to' place for additive manufacturing and its applications. The Centre will undertake a user-defined and user-driven programme of innovative research that underpins Additive Manufacturing as a sustainable and value-adding manufacturing process across multiple industry sectors.Additive Manufacturing (AM) is the direct production of end-use component parts made using additive layer manufacturing technologies. It enables the manufacture of geometrically complex, low to medium volume production components in a range of materials, with little, if any, fixed tooling or manual intervention beyond the initial product design. AM enables a number of value chain configurations, such as personalised component part manufacture but also economic low volume production within high cost base economies. This innovative approach to manufacturing is now being embraced globally across industry sectors from high value aerospace / automotive manufacture to the creative and digital industries. To date AM research has almost exclusively focused upon the production of single material, homogeneous structures (in polymers, metals and ceramics). The EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Additive Manufacturing will move away from single material, 'passive' AM processes and applications that exhibit conventional levels of functionality, toward the challenges of investigating next generation, multi-material active additive manufacturing processes, materials and design systems. This transformative approach is required for the production of the new generation of high-value, multi-functional products demanded by industry. The Centre will initially explore two themes as the centrepieces of a wider research portfolio, supported by a range of platform activities. The first theme takes on the challenge of how to design, integrate and effectively implement multi-material, multi-functional manufacturing systems capable of matching the requirements of industrial end-users for 'ready-assembled' multifunctional devices and structures. Working at the macro level, this will involve the convergence of several approaches to increase embedded value to the product during the manufacturing stage by the direct printing / deposition of electronic / optical tracks potentially on a voxel by voxel basis; the processing and bonding of dissimilar materials that ordinarily require processing at varying temperatures and conditions will be particularly challenging. The second theme will explore the potential for 'scaling down' AM for small, complex components, extending single material AM to the printing of optical / electronic pathways within micro-level products and with a vision to directly print electronics integrally. The platform activities will provide the opportunity to undertake both fundamental and industry driven pilot studies that both feed into and derive from the theme-based research, and grow the capacity and capability of the Centre, creating a truly national UK Centre and Network that maintains the UK at the front of international research and industrial exploitation in Additive Manufacturing.