The MUFFINS project assembles a multidisciplinary team from Newcastle University, Imperial College London, University of Glasgow, industrial partners including BP, Chevron, TOTAL and Forsys Subsea, who are members of the Transient Multiphase Flow and Flow Assurance Consortium, Wood Group, Xodus Group, Orcina and TNO in the Netherlands, and an academic partner, the National University of Singapore, to develop the next generation of pioneering technologies and cost-efficient tools for the safe, reliable and real-life designs of subsea systems (pipelines, risers, jumpers and manifolds) transporting multiphase hydrocarbon liquid-gas flows. This world-leading academia-industry collaboration will be the first of its kind to strengthen the UK international competitiveness in multiphase flow designs for offshore oil and gas applications. The proposed framework will specifically address fundamental and practical challenges in areas of internal multiphase flow-induced vibration (MFIV), in combination with external flow vortex-induced vibration (VIV), whose fatigue damage effects due to complicated fluid-structure interaction mechanisms can be catastrophic and result in costly production downtime. From a practical viewpoint, liquid-gas slug flows induced by the pipe geometry, seabed topography or thermo-physic-hydrodynamic instability, are common and problematical. Such flows have a highly complex hydrodynamic nature as the different mechanical properties of the deformable and compressible phases cause spatial and temporal variability in the combination and interaction of the interfaces. Subsea layout architecture, operational lifetime and environmental conditions can all affect the flow-pipe interaction patterns. Nevertheless, reliable practical guidelines and systematic frameworks for the response, stress and fatigue assessment of subsea structures undergoing MFIV are lacking. Greater complexities and unknowns arise when designing these structures subject to combined MFIV-VIV. Through an integrated programme combining modelling, simulation and experiment, high-fidelity three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics will be performed and a hierarchy of innovative and cost-efficient reduced-order models will be developed to capture vital multiple MFIV and VIV effects, providing significant insights into detailed flow features and fluid-structure coupling phenomena. Validation, verification, uncertainty and reliability analyses will be carried out by comparing numerical results with experimental tests and industrial data to improve confidence in identifying the likelihood of fatigue failure and safety risks. Computationally-efficient tools and open-source codes will be advanced and utilised by industry and worldwide researchers. The project will minimise uncertainties in MFIV-VIV predictions associated with multi-scale multi-physics fluid-elastic solid interactions, ultimately delivering improved design optimisation and control of the most efficient multiphase flow features. The UK oil and gas industry has been at the heart of the UK prosperity for five decades but has faced significant challenges recently. In October 2016, the UK Government founded the Oil & Gas Authority to safeguard collaboration, maximise resource recovery from the UK Continental Shelf, and maintain the UK competitiveness with future investments. In alignment with these strategies, the MUFFINS project will deliver the maximum benefits to and security of global oil and gas energy by means of cutting-edge technologies, cost-efficient tools and recommended guidelines to significantly improve the integrity, reliability and safety of subsea systems transporting multiphase flows. The project will upskill the next-generation engineers and scientists in the oil and gas sector. The technical know-how and deliverables will lead to a transformative improvement in structural designs and reduction of environmental impacts, operational and maintenance costs.

This proposal is for a Doctoral Training Centre to provide a new generation of engineering leaders in Offshore & Marine Renewable Energy Structures. This is a unique opportunity for two internationally leading Universities to join together to provide an industrially-focussed centre of excellence in this pivotal subject area. The majority of informed and balanced views suggest approximately 180 TWh/year of offshore wind, ~300km of wave farms (19 TWh/year), 1,000 tidal stream turbines (6 TWh/year) and 3 small tidal range schemes (3 TWh/year) are desirable/achievable using David MacKay's UK DECC 2050 Pathways calculator. These together would represent 30% of predicted actual UK electricity demand. This would be a truly enormous renewable energy contribution to the UK electricity supply, given the predicted increase of electricity demand in the transport sector. The inclusion of onshore wind brings this figure closer to 38% of UK electricity by 2050. RenewablesUK predicts Britain has the opportunity to lead the world in developing the emerging marine energy industry with the sector having the potential to employ 10,000 people and generate revenues of nearly £4bn per year by 2020. The large scale development of offshore renewable energy (Wind, Wave and Tidal) represents one of the biggest opportunities for sustainable economic growth in the UK for a generation. The emerging offshore wind sector is however unlike the Oil & Gas industry in that structures are unmanned, fabricated in much larger volumes and the commercial reality is that the sector has to proactively take measures to further reduce CAPEX and OPEX. Support structures need to be structurally optimised and to avail of contemporary and emerging methodologies in structural integrity design and assessment. Current offshore design standards and practices are based on Offshore Oil & Gas experience which relates to unrepresentative target structural reliability, machine and structural loading characteristics and scaling issues particularly with respect to large diameter piled structural systems. To date Universities and the Industry have done a tremendous job to help device developers test and trial different concepts however the challenge now moves to the next stage to ensure these technologies can be manufactured in volume and deployed at the right cost including installation and maintenance over the full design life. This is a proposal to marry together Marine and Offshore Structures expertise with emerging large steel fabrication and welding/joining technologies to ensure graduates from the programme will have the prerequisite knowledge and experience of integrated structural systems to support the developing Offshore and Marine Renewable Energy sector. The Renewable Energy Marine Structures (REMS) Doctoral Centre CDT will embrace the full spectrum of Structural Analysis in the Marine Environment, Materials and Engineering Structural Integrity, Geotechnical Engineering, Foundation Design, Site Investigation, Soil-Structure Interaction, Inspection, Monitoring and NDT through to Environmental Impact and Quantitative Risk and Reliability Analysis so that the UK can lead the world-wide development of a new generation of marine structures and support systems for renewable energy. The Cranfield-Oxford partnership brings together an unrivalled team of internationally leading expertise in the design, manufacture, operation and maintenance of offshore structural systems and together with the industrial partnerships forged as part of this bid promises a truly world-leading centre in Marine Structures for the 21st Century.