The UK has made considerable progress decarbonising its power sector. However, decarbonising space-heating has been much more challenging. Currently, space-heating accounts for ~1/3 of the country's CO2 emissions. This must change to achieve Net Zero Two main low-carbon heating solutions are being considered: 1) direct heating from hydrogen combustion in boilers and 2) electrically-driven heat-pumping. Although both are promising, there are serious challenges to overcome. National Grid and other gas network operators have confirmed the technical feasibility of distributing hydrogen through the existing gas infrastructure, which connects >23 million properties. Hydrogen boilers are not commercially available yet, but they are well underway. Hydrogen can be made from renewable electricity; however, a big downside is that when combusted in boilers, the amount of energy we recover is only ~60% of what we spent making it. It is not a very efficient process. Electric heat pumps have a much higher efficiency. The amount of heat they provide can be as much as 3x the amount of electricity they consume. So, for every 1kWh of electricity used, a heat pump will give 3kWh of heat. This in stark contrast to the 0.6 kWh that would be obtained if the same 1kWh of electricity was used to make hydrogen, and that hydrogen was combusted in a boiler. Although it seems like using electric heat pumps is the way to go, there is a major problem. The electricity grid does not have the capacity to support their use in any significant fraction of UK homes. The reason for this is the huge energy demand for heating purposes. During winter, the peak demand in the gas network is more than 4x than the peak demand in the electricity grid. But also, during the first few hours of each day, the gas network experiences power-ramps that are 10x greater than what the electricity grid sees. The electricity grid does not have the capacity to provide the same levels of energy and power as the gas network. The upgrades required to enable the electricity grid to take on the gas network's duty are too expensive to be viable. It is precisely these challenges that are holding back the UK's transition to low-carbon heating. This postdoctoral fellowship addresses this issue by investigating and developing a deep understanding of a novel set of technologies called 'High-Performance Heat-Powered Heat-Pumps (HP3)'. These innovative heating systems combine the best attributes of the two main low-carbon options being considered (hydrogen boilers and electric heat pumps) and at the same time, removes their drawbacks. The widespread adoption of HP3 systems will enable the gas network to distribute hydrogen to homes across the country and therefore to continue to supply the enormous demand for energy during winter. HP3 systems deliver a greater benefit per unit of H2 consumed in comparison to hydrogen boilers. This will help the gas network to supply hydrogen to even more homes but also, consumers will enjoy reduced bills. By keeping the gas network in service, the use of HP3 systems will avoid placing an overwhelmingly large load on the electricity grid that would be created if the country adopted electrically-driven heat-pumping. This fellowship will develop detailed computational models to simulate the operation of HP3 systems in order to understand the effect that different design and operational variables have on their performance. Special focus will be given to exploring ultra-high operating pressures at this can lead to reductions in the overall cost of the units. A laboratory prototype will be developed and tested to demonstrate the functionality concept. This work has real prospects to be transformational in two different ways: (i) triggering a step-change in the UK 'boiler industry' towards more sophisticated and much higher-value products and (ii) accelerating the achievement of Net Zero by improving affordability.

Robotics is changing the landscape of innovation. But traditional design approaches are not suited to novel or unknown habitats and contexts, for instance: robot colonies for ore mining, exploring or developing other planets or asteroids, or robot swarms for monitoring extreme environments on Earth. New design methodologies are needed that support optimising robot behaviour under different conditions for different purposes. It is accepted that behaviour is determined by a combination of the body (morphology, hardware) and the mind (controller, software). Embodied AI and morphological computing have made major progress in engineering artificial agents (i.e., robots) by focusing on the links between morphology and intelligence of natural agents (i.e., animals). While such a holistic body-mind approach has been hailed for its merits, we still lack an actual pathway to achieve this. While this goal is ambitious, it is achievable by introducing a unique methodology: a hybridisation of the physical evolutionary system with a virtual one. On the one hand, it is appreciated that an effective design methodology requires the use and testing of physical robots. This is because simulations are prone to hidden biases, errors and simplifications in the underlying models. Simulating populations of robots (rather than just simulating specific parts) leads to accumulated errors and a lack of physical plausibility: the evolved designs will not work in the real system. This is the notorious reality gap of evolutionary robotics. On the other hand, evolving everything in hardware is time and resource consuming. One of our major innovations is to run simulated evolution concurrently with the physical and hybridise them by cross-breeding, where a physical and a virtual robot can parent a child that may be born in the real world, in the virtual world or in both. The advantages of such a hybrid system are significant. Physical evolution is accelerated by the virtual component that can run faster to find good robot features with less time and resources; simulated evolution benefits from the influx of genes that are tested favourably in the real world. Furthermore, monitoring of and feedback from the physical system can improve the simulator, reducing the reality gap.

Most chemical synthesis is performed in solution because in this phase it is easy to ensure that there are a large number of reactive collisions between reactant molecules. In addition, solution chemistry is well understood and we thus have a high degree of control over the reactions that can be performed and the products that can be synthesised. The problem with this approach is twofold. Firstly, the solvents many solvents are environmentally unfriendly and secondly separating the product from the solution at the end of the reaction often requires distillation, which requires a large input of energy and which introduces an extra step to the whole process. It would thus be enormously beneficial if this step could be avoided and if the solvent could be eliminated. Mechanochemical reactions allow for just this possibility. In these processes the reactants are powdered crystals. These powders are mixed together and mechanical work is done on the mixture in, for example, a mortar and pestle, a ball mill or an extruder. Experiments have demonstrated that it is possible to do a wide range of reactions in this way i.e., "mechanochemically". Furthermore, these mechanochemical processes are seen in some quarters to be the best way to synthesise systems known as co-crystals in which one or more chemical components are packed together into an ordered, crystalline structure. However, wider use of these processes and commercialization of these technologies is prevented because of the relative lack of understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that are in play in these reactions. The aim of this project is to examine what happens in a mechanochemical reaction by performing molecular dynamics simulations using a computer. Such simulations are useful because it is possible to keep track of the positions of all the atoms at all times. This, however, is also the difficulty as specialized tools are required to make sense of large volume of high dimensional data that emerges from such simulations. One of our intentions is, therefore, to develop computational tools for studying these highly complex processes. Throughout the work a reaction between two pharmaceutically active molecules, aspirin and meloxicam, will be studied. We will construct models for nanoparticles composed of each of these molecule types and will use non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations to force collisions between these particles to occur. Collisions will be performed for a range of collision velocities and for a number of different collision geometries. We will investigate head on collisions between the particles and glancing collisions as well as collisions in which we will change the relative orientations of the two crystal structures. For all these various kinds of collisions we will investigate the degree to which the two chemical components mix and the degree to which the crystallinity of the structure is disrupted by the collision. This work will give us one of the first visualizations of the zone of reaction in a mechanochemical process. More importantly, however, it will provide us with a way of rationalising what is being observed in the reactive zone. This work will thus provide new fundamental insights into how and why these reactions proceed and will serve as a basis for future work on the comercial exploitation of these reactions.

This project is primarily concerned with the structural performance (strength & deformation capacity) of flat slab-column connections in reinforced concrete (RC) structures subjected to impact and blast loading. Flat slabs have been widely used in construction in the UK and worldwide due to their low cost and quick construction. Over the last 30 years, the interest on RC structures with high resilience to impulsive loads due to impact and blast has increased significantly to improve protection against the threat of terrorist acts targeting infrastructure or industrial accidents such as gas explosions or vehicle collisions. These extreme events can have catastrophic consequences in terms of human losses, economic losses and environmental impact. Structures that are required to resist high dynamic loads are for example office buildings and parking garages with high levels of threat (e.g. diplomatic buildings or important centres for business and transportation), industrial and storage facilities, nuclear power plants, protective barriers and some bridge piers. Previous research suggests that design against blast loading should be risk-based in which the type, probability and consequences of the event need to be examined against the costs of the protection and the assumed potential loss. The reliability of this type of analysis depends greatly on the accuracy in the estimation of the behaviour of the structure against impact or blast loading. The prediction of the residual strength of RC structures subjected to impulsive loading can be extremely challenging due to strong material nonlinearities and the influence of high strain rates on the behaviour. Shear mechanisms generally govern the response of RC structures subjected to impulsive loads and joint regions are generally critical. Shear failures have been observed experimentally even in members that were designed for static loading to fail in a ductile flexural manner. This is concerning since shear failures are brittle and can lead to progressive collapse of the structure. The dynamic effects on punching shear and progressive collapse are not well understood in RC structures and up to date there is no known physical model to predict the strength and deformation capacity of punching shear under impulsive loading. The principal aim of this project will be to provide a theoretical model for the design and analysis of slab-column connections under impulsive loading which can be used in practice by researchers and designers. Existing experimental data will be used to validate the model and non-linear dynamic FE analysis will be carried out to support the theoretical model.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.