The coastal zone plays a crucial part in addressing two of the most pressing issues facing humanity: energy supply and water resources. Marine renewable energy and desalination are both characterised by the deployment of relatively small-scale technology (for example, tidal turbines, or desalination plant outfalls) in large-scale ocean flows. Understanding the multi-scale interactions between sub-metre scale installations and ocean currents over tens of kilometres is crucial for assessing environmental impacts, and for optimisation to minimise project costs or maximise profits. The vast range of scales and physical processes involved, and the need to optimise complex coupled systems, represent highly daunting software development and computational challenges. Geographically, the UK is uniquely positioned to become a world leader in marine renewable energy, but adequate software will be a key factor in determining the success of this new industry. To address this need, this project will re-engineer a unique CFD to marine scale modelling package to provide performance-portability, future-proofing and substantially increased capabilities. To motivate this we will target two applications: renewable energy generation via tidal turbine arrays and dense water discharge from desalination plants. Both are characterised by a common wide range of spatial and temporal scales, the need for design optimisation and accurate impact assessments, and a current lack of the required software. This project will build upon several world-leading open source software projects from the assembled multi-disciplinary research team. This team already has a long and successful track record of working together on the development of high quality open source software which is able to exploit large-scale high performance computing and has been used widely in academia and industry. In addition, the project has assembled a wide range of suitable project partners to aid in the delivery of the project as well as to promote longer term impact. These include complementary centres of excellence in cutting-edge software development, industry leaders in the targeted application areas, marine consultancies, and those contributing to environmental regulation.

Bioenergy provides a significant proportion of the UK's low carbon energy supply for heat, transport fuel and electricity. There is scope for bioenergy to provide much higher levels of low carbon energy in future, but this requires appropriate development of key enabling technologies and strategic management to make the best use of the valuable, but finite, biomass resource. It must also be acknowledged that there have been significant concerns raised about the long term sustainability of bioenergy systems, including the wider social and economic impacts of biomass production. This project will create a Supergen Bioenergy hub for the UK which will bring together industry, academia and other stakeholders to focus on the research and knowledge challenges associated with increasing the contribution of UK bioenergy to meet strategic environmental targets in a coherent, sustainable and cost-effective manner. It will do this by taking a "whole systems" approach to bioenergy, so that we focus on the benefits that new technologies can bring within the context of the whole production and utilisation chain. In order to ensure focused research with rapid dissemination and deployment this will be done in close collaboration with industrial partners and other stakeholders, including government agencies. The hub will also take an expressly interdisciplinary approach to bioenergy, ensuring that we address important issues, such as the impacts of land-use change not just as scientific quantification exercises, but taking due account of the social and economic impacts. The hub will carry out leading edge research to address the engineering challenges associated with bioenergy deployment, with a particular focus on enabling flexible energy vectors. Therefore we will carry out core research to address existing problems, for example increasing scientific understanding of biomass combustion to improve environmental emissions and developing torrefaction (heating the feedstock), which could improve the logistics (and therefore costs) of using biomass. However, we will also work on more strategic, long term options; using academic expertise to help industry resolve the engineering problems experienced to date with some advanced technologies like gasification and assessing the prospects for biomass-derived synthetic natural gas as a low carbon alternative to diminishing natural gas supplies and developing new technologies to produce more sustainable transport fuels from biomass. The project will progress many different bioenergy options for the UK, which have many different costs and benefits. Therefore we will particularly focus on evaluating the ecological, economic and social aspects of the bioenergy chains being developed. That will allow us to provide appropriate scientific evidence and information to government and other stakeholders to facilitate development of the most sustainable bioenergy systems for the UK.

This proposal is to establish a DTC in Wind and Marine Energy Systems. It brings together the UK's leading institutions in Wind Energy, the University of Strathclyde, and Marine Energy, the University of Edinburgh. The wider aim, drawing on existing links to the European Research Community, is to maintain a growing research capability, with the DTC at is core, that is internationally leading in wind and marine energy and on a par with the leading centres in Denmark, the USA, Germany and the Netherlands. To meet the interdisciplinary research demands of this sector requires a critical mass of staff and early stage researchers, of the sort that this proposal would deliver, to be brought together with all the relevant skills. Between the two institutions, academic staff have in-depth expertise covering the wind and wave resource, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics, design of wind turbines and marine energy devices, wind farms, fixed and floating structures, wind turbine, wind farm and marine energy devices control, power conversion, condition monitoring, asset management, grid-integration issues and economics of renewable energy. A centre of learning and research with strong links to the Wind and Marine Energy industry will be created that will provide a stimulating environment for the PhD students. In the first year of a four year programme, a broad intensive training will be provided to the students in all aspects of Wind and Marine Energy together with professional engineer training in research, communication, business and entrepreneurial skills. The latter will extend throughout the four years of the programme. Research will be undertaken in all aspects of Wind and Marine Energy. A DTC in Wind and Marine Energy Systems is vital to the UK energy sector for a number of reasons. The UK electricity supply industry is currently undergoing a challenging transition driven by the need to meet the Government's binding European targets to provide 15% of the UK's total primary energy consumption from renewable energy sources by 2020. Given that a limited proportion of transport and heating energy will come from such sources, it is expected that electricity supply will make the major contribution to this target. As a consequence, 40% or more of electricity will have to be generated from non-thermal sources. It is predicted that the UK market for both onshore and offshore wind energy is set to grow to £20 billion by 2015.There is a widely recognised skills gap in renewable energy that could limit this projected growth in the UK and elsewhere unless the universities dramatically increase the scale of their activities in this area. At the University of Strathclyde, the students will initially be housed in the bespoke accommodation in the Royal College Building allocated and refurbished for the existing DTC in Wind and Marine Energy Systems then subsequently in the Technology and Innovation Centre Building when it is completed. At the University of Edinburgh, the students will be housed in the bespoke accommodation in the Kings Buildings allocated and refurbished for the existing IDC in Offshore Renewable Energy. The students will have access to the most advanced design, analysis and simulation software tools available, including the industry standard wind turbine and wind farm design tools and a wide range of power system and computation modelling packages. Existing very strong links to industry of the academic team will be utilised to provide strategic guidance to the proposed DTC in Wind and Marine Energy through company membership of its Industrial Advisory Board and participation in 8 week 7 projects as part of the training year and in 3 year PhD projects. In addition, to providing suggestions for projects and engaging in the selection process, the Industry Partners provide support in the form of data, specialist software, access to test-rigs and advice and guidance to the students.

This is a multidisciplinary project that brings together researchers from different academic backgrounds in order to address reliability, lifetime and efficiency in offshore wind farms, and to meet the needs of the UK electricity generation industry. The overarching aim is the reduction of the (levelised) cost of generation of the large offshore wind farms that the UK will need in order to meet national and international objectives in the reduction of CO2 emissions. The multidisciplinary aspect reflects the different but, in context, linked disciplines and brings together the growing discipline of energy meteorology, of aerodynamics and aeroelasticity, of fatigue and structural mechanics, and of systems control. That is, the approach is a holistic one, linking the environmental conditions with their impact on each rotor and the mechanisms to improve farm performance as a whole. The meteorological contribution is essential because of the range of wind flow conditions that exist, subjecting the turbines and - importantly for large wind farms - the wakes of the turbines to a range of unsteady conditions that are known to reduce wind farm efficiency, and to cause increased structural damage (when compared to small-scale onshore wind farms). Both these contribute to increased capital and operating costs. The energy potential for the UK from offshore wind is huge, but offshore wind energy is still at a relatively early stage in technological terms. The aerodynamic response of each turbine to a variety of conditions imposed by the wind flow and the wakes of upstream turbines depends on the aeroelastic behaviour of the blades, the load in turn imposed upon the turbine generator, and the response by the turbine control system. In a large wind farm, the behaviour of one turbine - principally how much energy it is extracting from the wind flow - affects the behaviour, efficiency and lifetime of wind turbines in its wake; the turbines are not independent of each other. In fact, all aspects of the performance of wind turbines within large offshore wind farms, whether power output, loads or operations, are affected by their interaction through the wakes. Hence, to improve the cost effectiveness of offshore wind energy requires a better understanding of the flow-field through the wind farm. The project will address this issue and develop models to better represent the flow-field including the wakes and turbulence. Furthermore, capitalising on this, the implication for loads on the individual wind turbines will be investigated and the design of control strategies will be explored that achieve optimal operation of a large wind farm with each turbine controlled to keep operations and maintenance costs to acceptably low levels whilst (subject to this constraint) maximising farm output.