News Release

EPSRC announces green engineering fellowships

Grant and Award Announcement

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Four leading academics from the universities of Exeter, Sheffield, Bristol and Cambridge have been awarded substantial fellowship grants, totalling £2.38 million; it was announced today by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

They will carry out innovative research that will:

  • Enable better water management
  • Monitor the health of structures in the aerospace and wind energy sectors to save money and improve lifespan
  • Develop tools for optimising manufacturing design of aircraft and wind turbines
  • Provide computational models to calculate the effects of energy policies on global greenhouse gas emissions

The fellowships have been awarded to the following leading researchers and their teams.

A new approach to water management in UK cities

Professor David Butler, Co-Director of the internationally-leading Centre for Water Systems and Professor of Water Engineering at the University of Exeter, has been awarded a five-year fellowship, worth around £1.5 million.

Professor Butler said: "The water sector in the UK has, by many measures, been very successful up to now. However the sector is increasingly under threat as a result of climate change, increasing population, urbanisation, demographic shifts and tighter regulation.

"The fellowship is about understanding the key characteristics of sustainable and resilient water systems and then applying that understanding to develop and test new and improved ways to tackle problems associated with water scarcity, urban flooding and river pollution. The work will be carried out in conjunction with industry partners such as Severn Trent Water and government bodies such as the Environment Agency."

Health monitoring for structures in the aerospace and wind energy sectors

Professor Keith Worden, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sheffield, has been awarded a fellowship worth around £900,000 to fund this project.

The project aims to provide a means to monitor the structural health of populations such as fleets of aircraft or offshore wind farms. Professor Worden said: "The fundamental idea is to allow a form of epidemiology for structures.

"The ultimate objective of my main area of research – structural health monitoring – is to provide a means for industry to optimise management of their assets by allowing them to diagnose potential problems in operation at as early a stage as possible. This will have overwhelming benefits in terms of both cost of ownership and safety of operation. The aerospace industry alone could save potentially millions of pounds from more effective maintenance and asset management strategies.

"The EPSRC Fellowship will allow me the freedom and resources to concentrate on this challenge and bring my own experience and expertise to bear on the problem without the usual, but necessary distractions from research that the senior academic usually faces."

Tools for optimising manufacturing design of aircraft and wind turbines

Dr Simon Neild, from the University of Bristol, has been awarded a five-year EPSRC Fellowship worth around £760,000 to develop a computer validation programme to analyse the behaviour of mechanical structures, focusing on the aerospace and wind energy sectors.

Dr Neild said: "Modern manufacturing is concerned with making structures more cost efficient whilst using fewer resources. For example aeroplanes are made with lighter wings to improve fuel efficiency, and wind turbines are made with longer blades. The need for greater efficiency in manufacturing is driving the need for new tools.

"Currently design tools used by design engineers and engineering consultants in the manufacturing process can't measure how structures behave under extreme conditions in terms of vibration, comfort, noise and fatigue life. The more flexible structures become, the more difficult they are to model. To account for this, designers employ multiple design cycles and may be forced to make structures heavier or stiffer than necessary – this is more costly in terms of materials and less fuel efficient.

"I hope that my work will help high-end manufacturing in the UK and make it even more competitive internationally."

Computational models to calculate the effect of energy policy on changes to global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions

Dr Jean-Francois Mercure, from Cambridge University, has been awarded around £230,000 to produce a computational modelling system which can be used by government to shape energy policy and will provide new data for climate change scientists.

Dr Mercure said: "The main aim of my research is to construct a system to answer questions about the impact of UK or international policy changes on global emissions. Policymakers and climate scientists can use the data we provide to assess whether policies for CO2 reduction will reach their goals."

Currently energy systems modelling predominantly relies on methodologies that attempt to provide optimal solutions. The research will use known empirical trends in how technologies have behaved in the past to project how they will behave in the real, non-optimal world.

Dr Mercure's research will focus on energy end-use transportation, household and industrial energy consumption, as solutions involving only energy supply sectors are currently over-represented.

Dr Mercure said: "This project will address the evolution of energy end-use technology and consumption, which will take an important role in any future scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions reductions."

###

Notes to Editors

Engineering Fellowships are awarded at all stages of an academic's career

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the UK's main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. EPSRC invests around £800 million a year in research and postgraduate training, to help the nation handle the next generation of technological change. The areas covered range from information technology to structural engineering, and mathematics to materials science. This research forms the basis for future economic development in the UK and improvements for everyone's health, lifestyle and culture. EPSRC works alongside other Research Councils with responsibility for other areas of research. The Research Councils work collectively on issues of common concern via Research Councils UK.

EPSRC is proud to be supporting the inaugural Global Grand Challenges Summit in London, 12th-13th March 2013. The event is being organised by the Royal Academy of Engineering in collaboration with EPSRC and other partners.

The projects are:

Professor David Butler, University of Exeter: 'Safe & SuRe: Towards a New Paradigm for Urban Water Management',

Professor Butler recently won the President's award from The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management's (CIWEM). David Butler is Professor of Water Engineering at the University of Exeter with some 30 years of experience in the water industry. He is Co-director of the Centre for Water Systems, with around 30 researchers working mainly in the areas of urban water, system optimisation and hydroinformatics. Working with David on the Safe & SuRe project are colleagues Dr Raziyeh Farmani, Dr Guangtao Fu and Dr Sarah Ward.

Professor Keith Worden, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sheffield: 'S3 - Disease Surveillance for Structures and Systems.'

Collaborators will include researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratories in the USA, and the Centre for Neuroimaging at the University of York with steering group members from major companies in the aerospace and wind energy sector.

Dr Simon Neild, the University of Bristol: 'Dynamic Design Tools for Understanding and Exploiting Nonlinearity in Structures'. Project partners include Stirling Dynamics.

Dr Jean-Francois Mercure, Cambridge University: 'Multi-sectoral interactions in global energy end-use'

The project will be carried out in partnership with economists at Cambridge Econometrics, environmental scientists at the University of East Anglia, the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change, and the Committee for Climate Change.

For more information, contact: Grace Palmer EPSRC Press Office on 01793 444404

Images are available from the Press Office.


Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.