The economics of machining aerospace structural components is fundamentally limited by regenerative chatter and process-damping. Harnessing these two phenomena will lead to enormous productivity gains and superior competitive advantage. For example, a recent project at Sheffield was able to avoid chatter and reduce machining times by a factor of 5, resulting in a multi-million pound contract being awarded to the sponsor. However, current scientific understanding of process-damping is inadequate, so that recent research has resorted to intuition, trial and error, or exhaustive experimental testing. This project aims to overcome these barriers by providing new scientific understanding and engineering tools, and to transfer this technology to the manufacturing community.

The Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) will undertake a wide variety of work in the Manufacturing, Construction and product design areas. The work will be contained within 5 programmes:1. Transforming Organisations / Providing individuals, organisations, sectors and regions with the dynamic and innovative capability to thrive in a complex and uncertain future2. High Value Assets / Delivering tools, techniques and designs to maximise the through-life value of high capital cost, long life physical assets3. Healthy & Secure Future / Meeting the growing need for products & environments that promote health, safety and security4. Next Generation Technologies / The future materials, processes, production and information systems to deliver products to the customer5. Customised Products / The design and optimisation techniques to deliver customer specific products.Academics within the Loughborough IMCRC have an internationally leading track record in these areas and a history of strong collaborations to gear IMCRC capabilities with the complementary strengths of external groups.Innovative activities are increasingly distributed across the value chain. The impressive scope of the IMCRC helps us mirror this industrial reality, and enhances knowledge transfer. This advantage of the size and diversity of activities within the IMCRC compared with other smaller UK centres gives the Loughborough IMCRC a leading role in this technology and value chain integration area. Loughborough IMCRC as by far the biggest IMRC (in terms of number of academics, researchers and in funding) can take a more holistic approach and has the skills to generate, identify and integrate expertise from elsewhere as required. Therefore, a large proportion of the Centre funding (approximately 50%) will be allocated to Integration projects or Grand Challenges that cover a spectrum of expertise.The Centre covers a wide range of activities from Concept to Creation.The activities of the Centre will take place in collaboration with the world's best researchers in the UK and abroad. The academics within the Centre will be organised into 3 Research Units so that they can be co-ordinated effectively and can cooperate on Programmes.

Composite materials, such as those based on carbon and glass fibre reinforced polymer play an important role in driving global decarbonisation, through corrosion resistant and high-performance products and light-weighting sectors such as transport that lead to improved fuel economy and so reduce emissions. Our proposal targets sustainability of high value composite components, through embedding ultra-thin glass planar sensors, that can be used during manufacture and through a component's life to assess parameters linked to structural performance. Hence informed decisions can be made to extend useable life and reduce the scrappage associated with manufacture. This makes most efficient use of our limited resource of energy and raw materials. In addition to environmental sustainability, this work will also have economic advantages enabling the UK economy to continue to grow innovative technology and associated highly skilled jobs. Despite the huge lightweighting benefit of composites they are not utilised to their full potential due to variability caused at the manufacturing stage. Composite components and the composite material they are made from are produced together. To achieve the desired material geometry features are included in their laminated structure that generate defects. To realise their full set of advantages new methodologies must be devised that support sustainable deployment integrated during production. At the manufacturing stage, many composite components are consigned to scrap before they go into service because of defect evolution. We are proposing a new non-invasive means to better monitor defect evolution and their affect on the final structural performance of the part. Once a composite component goes into service it is often heavier than necessary due to the design parameters necessary for safety assurance. Having an effective means of monitoring critical regions would motivate a means to reduce structural mass by reducing material usage, which in turn would allow increasing payload and or support a shift to heavier but more efficient designs. We are proposing a sensing methodology that can indicate a reduction in structural performance, as our sensors allow changes in through thickness strain to be captured. A laminated composite structure is designed to carry the load in the plane of the laminations as it is weak through the thickness of laminate. Any change in through thickness strain would be a prime indicator of a reduction in performance. At the end of the composite component's life there are currently limited options for recycling composites with 15% of the 110,000 tonnes of composites produced in the UK each year being reused at their end of life. Our sensors would support reuse and repurposing of large composite structures because a complete history of the component life cycle would be available through monitoring informing designers of the suitability to be deployed in other structural applications. To highlight the advantages of using the novel sensors we have chosen three important case studies/exemplars. The first is in the manufacture of thermosetting composites replacing the costly and time-consuming autoclave with microwave processing, which reduces energy consumption significantly. Our planar glass sensors will be non-conducting and so permit comprehensive in process monitoring, supporting uptake of microwave curing. As described above the through thickness strength of laminated composite materials is limited, hence 3D fibre architectures are being explored. Our second case study focuses on braiding process exploiting the sensor's geometry to fix it into a known position during the consolidation of the 3D fibre architecture in a thermoplastic matrix. Finally, we demonstrate the versatility of our sensors in an infield retrofitting application to extend the life of concrete infrastructure using composite repair patches.

The impact of road traffic on local air quality is a major public policy concern and has stimulated a substantial body of research aimed at improving underlying vehicle and traffic management technologies and informing public policy action. Recent work has begun to exploit the capability of a variety of vehicle-based, person-based and infrastructure-based sensor systems to collect real time data on important aspects of driver and traffic behaviour, vehicle emissions, pollutant dispersion, concentration and human exposure. The variety, pervasiveness and scale of these sensor data will increase significantly in the future as a result of technological developments that will enable sensors to become cheaper, smaller and lower in power consumption. This will open up enormous opportunities to improve our understanding of urban air pollution and hence improve urban air quality. However, handing the vast quantities of real time data that will be generated by these sensors will be a formidable task and will require the application of advanced forms computing, communication and positioning technologies and the development of ways of combining and interpreting many different forms of data. Technologies developed in EPSRC's e-Science research programme offer many of the tools necessary to meet these challenges. The aim of the PMESG project is to take these tools and by extending them where necessary in appropriate ways develop and demonstrate practical applications of e-Science technologies to enable researchers and practitioners to coherently combine data from disparate environmental sensors and to develop models that could lead to improved urban air quality. The PMESG project is led by Imperial College London, and comprises a consortium of partners drawn from the Universities of Cambridge, Southampton, Newcastle and Leeds who will work closely with one another and with a number of major industrial partners and local authorities. Real applications will be carried out in London, Cambridge, Gateshead and Leicester which will build on the Universities' existing collaborative arrangements with the relevant local authorities in each site and will draw on substantial existing data resources, sensor networks and ongoing EPSRC and industrially funded research activities. These applications will address important problems that to date have been difficult or impossible for scientists and engineers working is this area of approach, due to a lack or relevant data. These problems are of three main types; (i) measuring human exposure to pollutants, (ii) the validation of various detailed models of traffic behaviour and pollutant emission and dispersion and (iii) the development of transport network management and control strategies that take account not just of traffic but also air quality impacts. The various case studies will look at different aspects of these questions and use a variety of different types of sensor systems to do so. In particular, the existing sensor networks in each city will be enhanced by the selective deployment of a number of new sensor types (both roadside and on-vehicle/person) to increase the diversity of sensor inputs. The e-Science technologies will be highly general in nature meaning that will have applications not only in transport and air quality management but also in many other fields that generate large volume of real time location-specific sensor data.Each institution participating in this project will be submitting their resource summary individually to Je-s. The resources listed within this Je-S Proposal are solely those of Imperial College with other institutions submitting their costs seperately, with one case for support.

The impact of road traffic on local air quality is a major public policy concern and has stimulated a substantial body of researchaimed at improving underlying vehicle and traffic management technologies and informing public policy action. Recent work hassought to use a variety of vehicle-based, person-based and infrastructure-based sensor systems to collect data on key aspects ofdriver and traffic behaviour, emissions, pollutant concentrations and exposure. The variety and pervasiveness of the sensor inputsavailable will increase significantly in the future as a result both of the increasingly widespread penetration of existingtechnologies (e.g., GPS based vehicle tracking, CANbus interfaces to on-board engine management system data) within thevehicle parc and the introduction of new technologies (such as e.g., UV sensing and nanotechnology based micro sensors). Aparticularly exciting direction for future development will be in the use of vehicles as platforms for outward facing environmentalsensor systems, allowing vehicles to operate as mobile environmental probes, providing radically improved capability for thedetection and monitoring of environmental pollutants and hazardous materials.However, these developments present new and formidable research challenges arising from the need to transmit,integrate, model and interpret vast quantities of highly diverse (spatially and temporally varying) sensor data. Our approach in thisproject is to address these challenges by novel combination and extension of state-of-the-art eScience, sensor, positioning andmodelling (data fusion, traffic, transport, emissions, dispersion) technologies. By so doing, we aim to develop the capability tomeasure, model and predict a wide range of environmental pollutants and hazards (both transport related and otherwise) using agrid of pervasive roadside and vehicle-mounted sensors. This work will be at the leading edge of eScience, stretching thecapabilities of the grid in a number of aspects of the processing of massive volumes of sensor data.