The RBOC (Resilience Beyond Observed Capabilities) Network Plus will create new knowledge, new capabilities and new opportunities for collaboration to help the UK prepare for security threats in the coming decades. The starting point is a scenario of a catastrophic attack on digital and energy networks in the year 2051. RBOC N+ will convene some of the UK's leading experts in engineering, physical sciences, mathematics, health sciences, social and behavioural sciences, arts and humanities, and cross-disciplinary topics such as AI, security studies and urban planning, together with government and industry, to refine, deepen and test this scenario and to use it to create immersive simulations. These simulations will support 'Reverse COBR' workshops, in which government, industry and academia will work back from the scenario's impacts to understand how they developed and what could have been done to prevent and mitigate them. This and other outputs - a flexible research fund, community events, an online platform developed and maintained by a project partner - will develop insights, innovate and create impact in response to possible and likely security threats and capabilities. Insights will come from the network's investigation into what capabilities, techniques and vulnerabilities could be exploited by adversaries to mount high-impact attacks against the UK, and what capabilities could be used by public authorities to prepare for and respond to them. Innovation will come from original research using novel combinations of disciplines and methods, from new relationships between researchers and policy makers and practitioners in government and industry, and from a prototype simulator for modelling the scenario with outputs addressing policy and practice implications, technology requirements and research gaps. Impact will come from the creation of new understanding and capabilities for government and industry to prepare for, respond to, and mitigate the impacts of major attacks from hostile actors through research, academic engagement, cross-sectoral partnerships and a host of technological, organisational, legal and behavioural capabilities ready for practitioner use. RBOC N+ will deliver a simulation toolkit with tools, concepts, definitions, problem spaces and a digital application designed specifically for policy-makers and practitioners. And RBOC's impact will be sustainable: RBOC's demonstrable return on investment will stimulate and support applications for continued funding, through grant applications and direct investment from industry, policy makers and practitioners. RBOC N+ will respond to eight challenge areas, each being an important theme of future security threats or responses. 'Adversary Capabilities' will investigate how the UK's enemies may be able to attack, while 'Our Capabilities' will address how the UK can prepare and respond, particularly through technology. The 'Physical Environment' challenge area will explore how cities will change by the 2050s, and 'Societal Challenges' will address potential developments in the social and political contexts. 'Responding and Decision-Making' will examine organisational and policy responses. 'Data, Information and Communications Infrastructure' will explore developments in enabling digital technologies, infrastructures and resources. To ensure that RBOC and its outputs manage security and ethical risks in ways that maintain trust, the final challenge area addresses 'Responsible Innovation and Trusted Research'.

The UK is leading the development and installation of offshore renewable energy technologies. With over 13GW of installed offshore wind capacity and another 3GW under construction, two operational and one awarded floating offshore demonstration projects as well as Contracts for Difference awards for four tidal energy projects, offshore renewable energy will provide the backbone of the Net Zero energy system, giving energy security, green growth and jobs in the UK. The revised UK targets that underpin the Energy Security Strategy seek to grow offshore wind capacity to 50 GW, with up to 5 GW floating offshore wind by 2030. Further acceleration is envisaged beyond 2030 with targets of around 150 GW anticipated for 2050. To achieve these levels of deployment, ORE developments need to move beyond current sites to more challenging locations in deeper water, further from shore, while the increasing pace of deployment introduces major challenges in consenting, manufacture and installation. These are ambitious targets that will require strategic innovation and research to achieve the necessary technology acceleration while ensuring environmental sustainability and societal acceptance. The role of the Supergen ORE Hub 2023 builds on the academic and scientific networks, traction with industry and policymakers and the reputation for research leadership established in the Supergen ORE Hub 2018. The new hub will utilise existing and planned research outcomes to accelerate the technology development, collaboration and industry uptake for commercial ORE developments. The Supergen ORE Hub strategy will focus on delivering impact and knowledge transfer, underpinned by excellent research, for the benefit of the wider sector, providing research and development for the economic and social benefit of the UK. Four mechanisms for leverage are envisaged to accelerate the ORE expansion: Streamlining ORE projects, by accelerating planning, consenting and build out timescales; upscaling the ORE workforce, increasing the scale and efficiency of ORE devices and system; enhanced competitiveness, maximising ORE local content and ORE economic viability in the energy portfolio; whilst ensuring sustainability, yielding positive environmental and social benefits from ORE. The research programme is built around five strategic workstreams, i) ORE expansion - policy and scenarios , ii) Data for ORE design and decision-making, iii) ORE modelling, iv) ORE design methods and v) Future ORE systems and concepts, which will be delivered through a combination of core research to tackle sector wide challenges in a holistic and synergistic manner, strategic projects to address emerging sector challenges and flexible funding to deliver targeted projects addressing focussed opportunities. Supergen Representative Systems will be established as a vehicle for academic and industry community engagement to provide comparative reference cases for assessing applicability of modelling tools and approaches, emerging technology and data processing techniques. The Supergen ORE Hub outputs, research findings and sector progress will be communicated through directed networking, engagement and dissemination activities for the range of academic, industry and policy and governmental stakeholders, as well as the wider public. Industry leverage will be achieved through new co-funding mechanisms, including industry-funded flexible funding calls, direct investment into research activities and the industry-funded secondment of researchers, with >53% industry plus >23% HEI leverage on the EPSRC investment at proposal stage. The Hub will continue and expand its role in developing and sustaining the pipeline of talent flowing into research and industry by integrating its ECR programme with Early Career Industrialists and by enhancing its programme of EDI activities to help deliver greater diversity within the sector and to promote ORE as a rewarding and accessible career for all.

The biggest scientific and engineering challenges often lie in between disciplines. Through the years, we have gained a good understanding of how materials behave when subjected to mechanical loads (solid mechanics). We also understand the nature of the chemical reactions occurring when materials are exposed to a given environment (electrochemistry). However, predicting material behaviour due to combined exposure to mechanical loads and a degrading environment continues to be an elusive goal. Not being able to understand and predict electro-chemo-mechanics phenomena comes at a great cost since materials are very sensitive to environmental and mechanical degradation in many applications. The value of the fundamental science conducted in this fellowship will be demonstrated on two of these applications: (1) corrosion damage, and (2) Li-Ion batteries. Their importance cannot be emphasised enough. Solely in the UK, failure of structures and industrial components due to corrosion entails a staggering cost of £46 billion per annum. Li-Ion batteries are key enablers in achieving universal access to reliable, clean, sustainable energy. Now, there is an opportunity to develop models that can prevent corrosion failures and significantly enhance progress in battery technology. Larger computer resources and new algorithms enable simulating concurrent (coupled) physical processes such as chemical reactions, diffusion of species and mechanical deformation; so-called multi-physics modelling. However, the opportunity of building upon the success of multi-physics simulations to predict material degradation is held back due to our inability to model how the boundary between two different phases develops over time. For example, corrosion is often non-uniform, leading to small defects (pits) that grow and act as crack initiators. Preventing the associated catastrophic failures, such as the Morandi Bridge collapse, requires capturing how these defects will nucleate at the electrolyte-material interface and grow. But the modelling of morphological changes in an evolving interface has been long considered a mathematical and computational challenge. I will overcome this longstanding obstacle by smearing the "sharp" interface over a small diffuse region using an auxiliary "phase field" variable - a paradigm change that will make tracking of evolving interfaces amenable to numerical computations. A new generation of models will be developed and validated with powerful 3D techniques such as X-ray Computed Tomography, which have timely experienced notable improvements in spatial resolution and image reconstruction times. By explicitly capturing the damage process, this fellowship will not only open new horizons in the understanding of multi-physics material degradation phenomena but also set the basis for the introduction of simulation-based assessment in engineering practice; model predictions can be compared with inspection data, introducing the "Digital Twins" and "Virtual Testing" paradigms into engineering applications involving demanding environments. The near-term societal impact will be demonstrated by addressing salient technological problems in offshore energy, batteries, water supply networks and nuclear fission. Efforts will be guided by the fellowship advisory board, which includes leading firms in each of these sectors: EDF Energy, Rolls-Royce, SUEZ, PA Consulting, Vattenfall and Subsea7. For example, the new generation of models developed will be used to assist in the life extension decision of the oldest large-scale wind farm in the world, Horns Rev 1. The lessons learned in this world-first engineering assessment will set an example for the entire sector and demonstrate the potential of computer simulations in enhancing the economic viability of the leading renewable energy source. The successful fellowship will lay scientific foundations for new engineering solutions that will improve UK's competitiveness and our quality of life.

The Internet of Energy (IoE) is a paradigm towards achieving a "zero-carbon" society by optimising electrical energy usage, especially for emerging loads such as Electric Vehicles. The paradigm is a recognition that integrating the internet of things with energy sources and demand loads, enables real-time processing of data streams to support actionable decision support. The aim of this centre-to-centre collaboration is to conduct fundamental multi-disciplinary research in the cyber resilience of future IoE systems. As electric vehicles are likely to make the greatest use of battery capacity in the future, they will play a key role in the IoE infrastructures. According to the "Global EV Outlook 2020" report (https://www.iea.org/reports/global-evoutlook-2020, International Energy Agency), Electric Vehicle sales topped 2.1M globally in 2019, surpassing 2018 - already a record year - to boost the stock to 7.2M electric cars. As technological progress in the electrification of two/three-wheelers, buses and trucks advances and the market for them grows, electric vehicles are expanding significantly. This growth is further amplified through government regulations, e.g. phasing out of diesel and petrol vehicles. This percentage is also likely to grow both in the United Kingdom and Australia. To meet climate-change goals, half of UK cars must be electric by 2030 (according to the UK government). Similarly, the Australian government (https://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.au/) predicts that by 2040, electric vehicles (EVs) are projected to account for 70% to 100% of new vehicle sales. To meet the demand of the growing EV population, UK and Australian governments are ramping up the installation of charging infrastructure. For example, there are now more than 35,000 charge point connectors across the UK in over 13,000 locations - with around 7,000 charge point connectors added in 2020 alone. This makes electrical vehicles significant energy consumers in the IoE, with their batteries also providing the potential for energy storage in times of emergency or unexpected surges in demand. However, this benefit can only be effectively realised if we can secure the interaction between Electric Vehicles (EVs), charging infrastructure and the national grid. Since 2016, the number of cyber incidents involving vehicles has increased by 605%, with incident rates doubling on a year to year basis (according to 2020 Upstream security's global automotive cybersecurity report). The target of such cyber-attacks is not only private EVs but also commercial EVs. This proposal combines workstreams on attack modelling, data synthesis, attack generation and validation of these using testbeds across the UK and Australia. A simulator will be developed to support a number of "what-if" investigations in cyber resilience for EVs to be carried out. Partners in this proposal have expertise in cybersecurity, power electronics, electrical vehicles, artificial intelligence and distributed computing, and have extensive prior experience in multi-site collaborations. The IoE (cyber-physical) security theory developed in this project will also contribute to accelerated adoption of EV energy prosumers at the edge of the power grid. This proposal will also provide an opportunity for experienced and early career researchers to work collectively on the challenges identified above. A "future leaders" training programme will be developed as part of this proposal to create an "ideas exchange" community across students and academic faculty between the UK and Australian partners. Our industry partners will also be engaged through workshops and "sandpit" events to identify use cases that have industry relevance and which could provide the basis for future startups (in collaboration with entrepreneurship teams at our institutions). The shared testbeds and simulation environment developed will also provide a legacy on completion of this work.

Air quality in most East African cities has declined dramatically over the last decades and it air pollution is now the leading environmental risk factor for human health. There is a critical lack of data to assess air quality in East Africa, and therefore to quantify its effect upon human health. Air quality networks in East Africa are still in their early days, with the long term and systematic measurement of air pollutants only available at less than a handful of sites. Large spatial and temporal gaps in data exist. From a historical perspective, very little is known of air pollution concentrations before 2010. The lack of historical data makes it extremely difficult to assess the deleterious effects of air pollution upon human health. It also poses challenges for assessing the efficacy of air quality interventions. Hence informed decisions about infrastructure, which take air quality into account are difficult to make. This proposal forms a new network to co-create strategy and protocols to bring together data that relate to air pollution in East African Urban areas. It targets the capitals of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa), Kenya (Nairobi) and Uganda (Kampala). New data science techniques will be developed to synthesize disparate data streams into spatially and temporally coherent outputs, which can be used to understand historic, contemporary and future air quality. The proposal will provide a road map to harness the power of new data analytics and big data technologies. To design this roadmap, three high intensity workshops and interspersed virtual meetings will be undertaken in Stage 1. Each workshop will tackle a key knowledge gap or development challenge: - Workshop 1: Parameterizing the data problem in East Africa for assessing the causes and effects of air pollution (Kampala) - Workshop 2: Big data approaches to improve East Africa air quality prediction (Addis Ababa) - Workshop 3: Creating greater capacity and capability in analytic air quality science (Nairobi) The Stage 1 research outcomes will enable the development of tailored mitigation strategies for improving air quality. The methodologies developed in the proposal will be translatable and scalable throughout urban East Africa. Hence, the proposal will help realise multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs), including SDG3: Good health and well-being, SDG11: Sustainable cities and communities, and SDG17: Partnerships for the goals. To ensure the project reaches its maximum potential, it includes an extensive array of research translation activities: workshops with academic and non-academic stakeholders; a professionally designed website, which will hold both academic and non-academic outputs including open source academic papers and presentations; briefing notes directed at a range of external stakeholders, including top down governance and bottom up grassroots organizations. Project partners from business, academia, governance and public engagement with science are involved and will attend the workshops. They are Uber, Amazon Web Services, PA Consulting, Kampala Capital City Authority, African Population Health Research Centre, Birmingham Open Media, GCRF Multi-Hazard Urban Disaster Risk Transitions Hub, and the Alan Turing Institute. They offer an additional £102,951 of in-kind contributions to the project. Their incorporation widens the available skillsets and will help deliver long-term impact in the East African region.