The global energy sector is facing considerable pressure arising from climate change, depletion of fossil fuels and geopolitical issues around the location of remaining fossil fuel reserves. Energy networks are vitally important enablers for the UK energy sector and therefore UK industry and society. Energy networks exist primarily to exploit and facilitate temporal and spatial diversity in energy production and use and to exploit economies of scale where they exist. The pursuit of Net Zero presents many complex interconnected challenges which reach beyond the UK and have huge relevance internationally. These challenges vary considerably from region to region due to historical, geographic, political, economic and cultural reasons. As technology and society changes so do these challenges, and therefore the planning, design and operation of energy networks needs to be revisited and optimised. Electricity systems are facing technical issues of bi-directional power flows, increasing long-distance power flows and a growing contribution from fluctuating and low inertia generation sources. Gas systems require significant innovation to remain relevant in a low carbon future. Heat networks have little energy demand market share, although they have been successfully installed in other northern European countries. Other energy vectors such as Hydrogen or bio-methane show great promise but as yet have no significant share of the market. Faced with these pressures, the modernisation of energy networks technology, processes and governance is a necessity if they are to be fit for the future. Good progress has been made in de-carbonisation in some areas but this has not been fast enough, widespread enough across vectors or sectors and not enough of the innovation is being deployed at scale. Effort is required to accelerate the development, scale up the deployment and increase the impact delivered.

Our infrastructure is central to the economic prosperity of the nation and to the flourishing of a stable, yet dynamic, civil society. Its interconnected strands - the energy, transportation, water, sanitation and communication networks that provide access to services and markets and which underpin the securities of daily life - must be not only affordable and reliable but also resilient against threats such as technological uncertainty, environmental causes, economic and political change, and demographic and societal change unfolding in an increasingly uncertain world. FIBE2 CDT will lead a paradigm shift in the approach to infrastructure resilience through the creation of an inspirational doctoral training programme for talented cohorts from diverse academic and social backgrounds to conduct world-class, cutting-edge and industry-relevant research. Our goal is to develop the infrastructure professionals of the future, equipped with a versatile and cross-disciplinary skillset to meet the most complex emerging challenges, harness the full value of existing infrastructure and contribute effectively to better infrastructure decision-making in the UK. The programme's technical focus will exploit high-level interconnected research themes in advanced infrastructure materials, rethinking design & construction, digitised civil engineering, whole-life performance, built environment and global challenges, along high-level crosscutting themes in emerging technologies, performance to data to knowledge, research across scales, and risk and uncertainty. In FIBE2 CDT we offer a radical rethink to deliver innovation for the cross-disciplinary and interconnected challenges in resilient infrastructure. Our 1+3 MRes/PhD programme proposes a new approach to infrastructure research where students from different disciplines proactively forge new training and research collaborations. FIBE2 is inspired by the paradigm of a 3D 'T' shaped engineer embodying a combination of depth and breadth of knowledge, augmented by our new thinking around cross-disciplinary training and research. High level Infrastructure Engineering concepts will be interlinked and related to the detailed technical fundamentals that underpin them in bespoke core and elective modules. Cohort-based learning will bridge across the wider environmental, societal, economic, business and policy issues within the even broader context of ethics, responsible innovation and ED&I. These depth and breadth elements are interwoven and brought together through problem-based challenges using large-scale cross-disciplinary infrastructure projects. Individual student plans will be carefully crafted to harmonise the specificity of PhD research with the need for expansive understanding of threats and opportunities. The development of Resilient FIBE2 CDT students with strong personal, technical and professional resilience attributes is integral to the FIBE2 approach to training and research. The FIBE2 PhD projects will build upon Cambridge's internationally leading research, investment and funding in the diverse areas related to infrastructure and resilience. Our major strategic initiatives include >£60M funding from EPSRC and industry. Our engagements in UKCRIC, CDBB, Alan Turing and Henry Royce Institutes and our world class graduate training programmes provide an inspirational environment for the proposed CDT. The FIBE2 vision has been co-created with our 27 strategic industry partners from across all infrastructure sectors and nine international academic centre partners across the world, who have pledged over £12M. We will work together to deliver the FIBE2 CDT objectives and add new dimensions to our students' experience. The lasting impact of FIBE2 will be embodied in our students acting as role models to inspire future generations of infrastructure engineers and rising to lead the profession through all the technological and societal challenges facing UK infrastructure.

Our Vision is for climate resilient, net zero development of the transport system to be guided by systems analysis. When this vision is realised, decision-makers will have access to (and visualisation of) data that tells them how transport is performing against resilience, decarbonisation, and other objectives, now and in the future. We will deliver them systems models that will help to pinpoint vulnerabilities and quantify the risks of failure. This will enable them to perform 'what-if' analysis of proposed investments and to stress-test scenarios for the major uncertainties that will determine the performance of future transport systems, such as population growth, new materials and technologies and climate change. Our ambition is to deliver co-created research that plots viable pathways and solutions for delivering a resilient, net-zero transport system that works for people and communities by 2050. DARe will be the go-to Hub because we will engage widely and proactively, and provide the evidence, guidance and tools to decision-makers that will enable them to prioritise early interventions and investments. . Our research programme will take a system-of-systems led approach to transport which recognises and addresses the challenges at the three, distinct but critically interlinked, scales of national, regional and local. It will address the interwoven challenges of resilience and net zero, for both existing and new transport infrastructures, and identify and provide solutions for new vulnerabilities that may occur because of the net zero transition, including critical interdependencies with digital and power infrastructures. It will demonstrate the benefits and opportunities that come from reimagining and rethinking how our transport systems deliver mobility to both people and the goods and services our economy relies on, and will offer insight on how governance and policy can enable and drive these changes. We have shaped our research programme in consultation with our multiple civic partners in North East and North West England, Northumberland, Cambridgeshire & Heartland and Scotland as well as our strong cohort of additional partners. DARe will build on this by opening the partnership to all and proactively engage in a programme of co-creation events during the first nine months to jointly define scenarios and storylines leading us towards addressing the dual challenge of decarbonising our local regional and national transport infrastructures whilst increasing their resilience and adaptability in a context of climate change. The role and participation of the wider research community via the DARe Flexible Fund will be instrumental in delivering this. The DARe work programme comprises five integrated work packages (WPs), four focussed research activities plus a management WP. WP1 delivers the co-created transport futures storylines which shape the research activities of the hub and develops the storylines to stress-test solutions across the three spatial scales, contextualised by the systems-of-systems interactions between transport-power-digital critical infrastructures. WP2 provides a new, transferable open-source modelling framework that will be co-developed with and made available to the wider community as a legacy of DARe. WP3 will address the physical implications for infrastructure assets and how their climate-perturbed performance will impact whole-life management. WP4 will provide insights into the wider implications and real-world impacts of the storylines when considering the policy, socio-economic, behavioural and land use planning aspects of the hub. WP0 will be dedicated to hub management, governance and engagement.

The global energy sector is facing considerable pressure arising from climate change, depletion of fossil fuels and geopolitical issues around the location of remaining fossil fuel reserves. Energy networks are vitally important enablers for the UK energy sector and therefore UK industry and society. Energy networks exist primarily to exploit and facilitate temporal and spatial diversity in energy production and use and to exploit economies of scale where they exist. The pursuit of Net Zero presents many complex interconnected challenges which reach beyond the UK and have huge relevance internationally. These challenges vary considerably from region to region due to historical, geographic, political, economic and cultural reasons. As technology and society changes so do these challenges, and therefore the planning, design and operation of energy networks needs to be revisited and optimised. Electricity systems are facing technical issues of bi-directional power flows, increasing long-distance power flows and a growing contribution from fluctuating and low inertia generation sources. Gas systems require significant innovation to remain relevant in a low carbon future. Heat networks have little energy demand market share, although they have been successfully installed in other northern European countries. Other energy vectors such as Hydrogen or bio-methane show great promise but as yet have no significant share of the market. Faced with these pressures, the modernisation of energy networks technology, processes and governance is a necessity if they are to be fit for the future. Good progress has been made in de-carbonisation in some areas but this has not been fast enough, widespread enough across vectors or sectors and not enough of the innovation is being deployed at scale. Effort is required to accelerate the development, scale up the deployment and increase the impact delivered.

Nuclear reactors in various forms are increasingly prominent in the context of net zero. However, stringent safety standards and advanced reactor designs necessitate ever-greater certainty and understanding in reactor physics and operation. As physical experimentation becomes more expensive, nuclear engineering relies increasingly on high-fidelity simulation of reactors. Traditionally, resolving different physical phenomena in a reactor (such as neutron transport or thermal-hydraulics) proceeded by assuming only a weak dependence upon other phenomena due to limits on computational power. Such approximations were allowable when additional conservatisms were included in reactor designs. However, more economical or sophisticated reactor designs render such approximations invalid, and reactor designers must be able to resolve the interplay between each physical phenomenon. This poses a challenge to reactor physicists due to vastly increased computational costs of multi-physics calculations, as well as the risks of numerical instabilities - these are essentially non-physical behaviours which are purely an artefact of simulation. This proposal aims to provide the basis of new computational approaches in nuclear engineering which are both substantially cheaper and more stable than present multi-physics approaches. Traditional methods tend to have one tool fully resolve one phenomenon, pass the information to another tool which resolves a second phenomenon, and then pass this updated information back to the first tool and repeat until (hopefully) the results converge. This proposal hopes to explore a slightly simpler approach, where information is exchanged between different solvers before each has fully resolved its own physics, extending this to many of the phenomena of interest to a reactor designer. Preliminary analysis suggests that this approach should be vastly more stable and computationally efficient than previous methods. The investigations will be carried out using home-grown numerical tools developed at the University of Cambridge which are designed for rapid prototyping of new ideas and algorithms. The final result is anticipated to transform the nuclear industry's approach to multi-physics calculations and greatly accelerate our ability to explore and design more advanced nuclear reactors.