As you read this you are probably sitting down. When you sat down, were you concerned that the chair would fail? You likely did not even consider it as you may have sat in this same chair hundreds, if not thousands of times before. You used your empirical knowledge that this chair is safe for you to sit in. What if this was a new chair to you? If the chair was brand new, you would take comfort in the fact that the chair has been manufactured to a standard and been subject to some level of quality control. If the chair belongs to an organisation then you would expect that organisation to take responsibility if the chair failed and would have been replaced if reported by another user. Failure of the chair will, very rarely, be due to a poor design. The chair will be able to withstand any expected loads assuming that it has been manufactured correctly; however, the material that it is made from will be inherently variable and contain defects that are not always apparent at the point of a manufacturing inspection. The degree of that material variability may be slight and the defect sizing understood, but making sure that the design takes account of this variability through life (especially when the chair is mistreated) is often not considered. To some extent we are all materials engineers when we make a judgement that the chair appears to be 'sturdy' before we sit down, but we do this based on our empirical knowledge and not on the science that is available to us. Are you sure the next time you sit in the chair it won't fail? Your empirical knowledge only informs you of what happened last time not what 'will' happen in the future. The application of materials science knowledge will inform the future performance. Bridging the gap between the atomistic world of materials science that defines the best estimate of mechanical performance and the bounding estimates required in materials engineering that takes account of the variability and defects is key to improving trust in applying materials science to engineering structures. Assurance is about the trust that we place that the quality system has not failed. The chair may have been subject to a level of quality control before it left the factory, at this stage we need to have trust in the manufacturer. If the chair belongs to an individual or organisation, we trust that as responsible owners, that they would replace the chair if broken and that they have systems in place to check if the chair is broken before someone sits on it. This fellowship is about developing a similar level of trust for future high integrity or critical applications. We cannot use empirical knowledge, i.e. we don't have thousands of years of experience with building fusion reactors or producing high integrity power transmission systems for aerospace applications, so we must use science. Developing a similar level of trust in the predictive modelling capability in the application of materials science to these complex and high value systems, to the empirical knowledge we all have of our usual chair is key to unlocking the public trust in the safe performance of future critical systems.

Metallic materials are indispensable to modern human life. From everyday items such as aluminium drinks cans, to advanced applications like jet engine turbine blades and the pressure vessels of nuclear reactors, the positive social impact of metals is difficult to overstate. Yet despite major advances in our understanding of the manufacture and properties of metals, significant challenges remain. Constructing the next generation of electric cars will require improved lightweight alloys and joining technologies. Development of fusion power plants, which will provide near-limitless carbon-free energy, will require the development of advanced alloy systems capable surviving the extreme environments found inside reactors. For the next generation of hypersonic air and space vehicles, we require propulsion systems capable of over Mach 5. Alloys will need to survive 1800 degrees Celsius, be made into complex shapes, and be joined without losing any of their properties. Overcoming these challenges by improving existing metallic materials, developing new ones, and adapting manufacturing methods, then the benefits will be substantial. Now is a particularly exciting time to be involved in metallurgical research and manufacturing. This is not only because of the kinds of compelling challenges specified above, but also because of the opportunities afforded by the emergence of new advanced manufacturing technologies. Innovative techniques such as 3D printing are enabling novel shapes and design concepts to be realised, whilst the latest solid-state processes allow for the design and production of bespoke alloys that cannot be made by conventional liquid casting techniques. Industry 4.0, or the fourth industrial revolution, provides opportunities to optimise emerging and established technologies through the use of material and process data and advanced computational techniques. In order to fully exploit these opportunities, we need to understand the complex relationships between the processing, structure, properties and performance of materials, and link these to the digital manufacturing environment. To deliver the factories of tomorrow, which will be critical to the future strength of UK plc and the wider economy, industry will require more specialists with a thorough understanding of metallic materials science and engineering. These metallurgists should also have the professional and technical leadership skills to exploit emerging computational and data-driven approaches, and be well versed in equality and diversity best practice, such that they can effect positive changes in workplace culture. The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Advanced Metallic Systems will help to deliver these specialists, currently in short supply, by recruiting and training cohorts of high level scientists and engineers. Through collaboration with industry, and a comprehensive training in fundamental materials science and computational methods, professional skills, and equality and diversity best practice, our graduates will be equipped to become future research leaders and captains of industry.

Project Description: DECOM-MPA will develop a Decision Support Document (DSD) and strengthen the evidence base to support decision making for decommissioning oil and gas infrastructure on the qualifying features and integrity of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). The DSD will meet the current requirements of the regulatory regime, but provide flexibility to evolve in response to changing regulations. Stakeholders as partners is considered essential to a successful project and significantly increases the likelihood that outputs will be applied to real-world decision-making. Objectives: (1) To develop a user-friendly DSD to facilitate decision-making for understanding the impacts (positive and negative) of decommissioning operations on the condition of MPA qualifying features and site integrity; (2) To gather and assess (providing confidence scores) the best available scientific evidence to underpin the assessment of impacts of decommissioning options on major marine habitats and species, including taking an innovative natural capital focus; (3) To engage end-users (incl. industry, industry bodies, SNCBs, regulators & academia) throughout the project to provide proof of concept, identify sources of evidence and provide case studies; (4) To assess potential short and long-term impacts of decommissioning options on MPA qualifying features and site integrity using industry-led case study examples from the North Norfolk Sandbanks and Saturn Reefs cSAC/SCI, and (5) To provide end-users with an innovative and user-friendly evidence-based approach to better understand the risks, opportunities and impacts of decommissioning on MPAs and the wider marine environment. Impacts: Although it is unlikely that the full impacts of DECOM-MPA will be measurable within the project timescale, expected impacts will provide the best combination of: Environmental benefits: - maintained or enhanced MPA integrity; - reduced impact on marine ecosystems; - maximisation of ecosystem service provision; - improved scientific evidence base to support sustainable decommissioning (as well as renewable energy and other construction activities within MPAs). Economic benefits: - support a transparent decision process, decreasing the likelihood of challenging the method selection and reducing associated additional time and cost of regulatory reviews of decommissioning programmes; - early insights into risks and opportunities presented by decommissioning operations; - strengthened links with academia to influence the future research agenda to deliver industry-relevant knowledge, and - enhancing transferability potential of decision support products to other areas. Societal benefits: - enhanced sustainability and societal acceptability of selected decommissioning options; - translating existing knowledge to make it useable and accessible to users; - improved knowledge gained through research (cognitive benefits); - identifying unrealised benefits from decommissioning options within and out with MPAs; - identified knowledge gaps improving efficiency of public research spending, and - enhanced reputation by exporting UK scientific excellence to inform global decommissioning solutions. Keywords: Decision Support Document, stakeholders, Marine Protected Areas, decommissioning, oil & gas, evidence, assessment, case studies Key Stakeholders: BEIS, JNCC, NE, SNH, Oil and Gas Industry, Oil and Gas Industry Representatives, Marine Scotland, MMO

In highly engineered materials, microscale defects can determine failure modes at the compo-nent/system scale. While X-ray CT is unique in being able to image, find, and follow defects non-destructively at the microscale, currently it can only do so for mm sized samples. This currently presents a significant limitation for manufacturing design and safe life prediction where the nature and location of the defects are a direct consequence of the manufacturing process. For example, in additive manufacturing, the defects made when manufacturing a test-piece may be quite different from those in a three dimensionally complex additively manufactured engineering component. Similarly, for composite materials, small-scale samples are commonly not large enough to properly represent all the hierarchical scales that control structural behaviour. This collaboration between the European Research Radiation Facility (ESRF) and the National Research Facility for laboratory CT (NRF) will lead to a million-fold increase in the volume of material that can be X-ray imaged at micrometre resolution through the development and exploitation of a new beamline (BM18). Further, this unparalleled resolution for X-rays at energies up to 400keV enables high Z materials to be probed as well as complex environmental stages. This represents a paradigm shift allowing us to move from defects in sub-scale test-pieces, to those in manufactured components and devices. This will be complemented by a better understanding of how such defects are introduced during manufacture and assembly. It will also allow us to scout and zoom manufactured structures to identify the broader defect distribution and then to follow the evolution of specific defects in a time-lapse manner as a function of mechanical or environmental loads, to learn how they lead to rapid failure in service. This will help to steer the design of smarter manufacturing processes tailored to the individual part geometry/architecture and help to establish a digital twin of additive and composite manufacturing processes. Secondly, we will exploit high frame rate imaging on ID19 exploiting the increased flux available due to the new ESRF-extremely bright source upgrade to study the mechanisms by which defects are introduced during additive manufacture and how defects can lead to very rapid failures, such as thermal runaway in batteries In this project, we will specifically focus on additive manufacturing, composite materials manufacturing and battery manufacturing and the in situ and operando performance and degradation of such manufactured articles, with the capabilities being disseminated and made more widely available to UK academics and industry through the NRF. The collaboration will also lead to the development of new data handling and analysis processes able to handle the very significant uplift in data that will be obtained and will lead to multiple site collaboration on experiments in real-time. This will enable us to work together as a multisite team on projects thereby involving less travelling and off-setting some of the constraints on demanding experiments posed by COVID-19.

The science and engineering of materials have been fundamental to the success of nuclear power to date. They are also the key to the successful deployment and operation of a new generation of nuclear reactor systems. The next-generation nuclear reactors (Gen IV) operating at temperatures of 550C and above have been previously studied to some extent and in many cases experimental or prototype nuclear systems have been operated. For example, the UK was the world-leading nation to operate the Dounreay experimental sodium-cooled fast nuclear reactor (SFR) for ~19 years and a prototype fast reactor for ~20 years. However, even for those SFRs with in total of 400 reactor-years international operating experience, their commercial deployment is still held up. A formidable challenge for the design, licensing and construction of next-generation Gen IV SFRs or the other high-temperature nuclear reactors is the requirement to have a design life of 60 years or more. The key degradation mechanisms for the high-temperature nuclear reactors is the creep-fatigue of steel components. When structural materials are used at high temperature, thermal ageing and inelastic deformation lead to changes in their microstructures. The creep and creep-fatigue performance of structural materials are limited by the degradation of microstructures. The underlying need is to develop improved understanding and predictive models of the evolution of the key microstructural features which control long-term creep performance and creep-fatigue interaction. This Fellowship will use an integrated experimental and modelling approach covering different length and time scales to understand and predict the long-term microstructural degradation and creep-fatigue deformation and damage process. I will then use the new scientific information to make significant technological breakthroughs in predicting long-term creep-fatigue life that include microstructural degradation process. I will thereby realise a radical step beyond the current phenomenological or a functional form of constitutive models which received very limited success when extrapolated to long-term operational conditions. This research will put me and the UK at the forefront of nuclear fission research. This Fellowship will enable the 60 years creep-fatigue life of the next-generation high-temperature nuclear systems by developing a materials science underpinned and engineering based design methodology and implement it into future versions of high-temperature nuclear reactor design codes. In consequence, Gen IV reactor technologies will become commercially viable and Gen IV SFRs will be built globally to provide an excellent solution for recycling today's nuclear waste. This fellowship aims to influence the international organisations responsible for the next-generation nuclear design codes and gaining an early foothold in the international nuclear R&D via this research will give the best chance to secure Intellectual Property and return long term economic gains to our UK.