We use a vast range of products directly or indirectly in everyday life. These range from soups to baby-foods to feed us; paints and coating products to provide robust structural materials; plastics and composites to create many products; and pharmaceutical drugs to fight disease. They share a similar manufacturing method in which raw materials (or reagents) are combined through physical or chemical means, and known as a 'process'. This takes place in a 'process vessel', which is often sealed, under pressure and at elevated temperature. Critical aspects of such processes are efficiency, product quality, energy use and emissions impact. The core aim of this project is to stimulate new sensing products that can enhance these aspects and exploit their markets through licences.The project builds upon our background science and experimental technology, which an estimation of the internal (invisible) distribution of process materials. These innovations harness two principles: spectroscopy - the identification of specific materials; and, tomography - the identification of the distribution of components within the process vessel (similar to methods to 'see inside' human bodies for medical diagnosis). Electrical energy using a 'compressed wide-band' is used, both to give the 'spectral' coverage and to provide fast response to suit dynamic processes. The project aims to provide a demonstration level for specific trial applications; to offer licensees a clear path for onward development into the two product forms: a 'point sensor' form, to identify materials in its immediate vicinity; and a 'zone sensor' form, to identify the distribution of specific materials. Increased knowledge empowers design and/or control to deliver major benefits to process end users: increased productivity and product quality, reductions in emissions and waste products, reduced energy demand and resulting carbon impacts. In illustration we can consider the advantages offered in two product examples. Pharmaceutical compounds are produced using crystallisation processes which are highly variable and can have poor yields such that some batches may not meet tight product specifications. This results in waste of energy, raw materials, and in the costly disposal of the useless out-of specification product. Here a Spec_zone sensor can transform 'process-knowledge' to allow 'smarter control, and gain a major increase in 'on-specification' yield, gaining obvious major benefits. These are very high value products and hence financial business savings can be large. The manufacture of foodstuffs follows a conventional recipe: such as mixing and cooking natural ingredients such as chopped vegetables in water. Unwanted objects in the product such as natural materials such as stalks and large seeds, and unnatural materials such as small pieces of metal or plastic are a possibility. Although these may be unpleasant for adults in products such as soups (but still present a serious 'brand' quality issue for the manufacturer) they may be dangerous if present in baby-foods. It is easy to find metals, using x-ray detectors on a pipeline, but much more difficult to find small objects, such small pieces of plastic or wood which can be detected by the 'wide-band' Spec_point sensor.In conclusion the ability to estimate the presence and concentration of specific materials and their distribution offers major benefits in effective process management. The project will provide demonstrations and concept details to enable licensees to develop future products, based on the Spec_point and Spec_zone concepts. It will include detailed application sectors studies to highlight potential early adopters. It is supported by two instrumentation suppliers who have expressed a keen interest in evaluation, and both have diverse markets and customers who are likely to be involved in evaluations.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil leak from the Macondo well into the Gulf of Mexico illustrate the twin compromises made when we exploit petroleum and its derived products: Firstly, the extreme environment where the leak occurred is a symptom of petroleum oil's finite supply and its increasingly expensive production. Secondly, chemicals and products made out of petroleum, including the 6.6 million litres of dispersants used to manage the spill, tend to be toxic and persistent in the environment. Biosurfactants are the various chemicals produced by nature to help change the surfaces that occur between things - for example, the stickiness forces in a new born baby's scrunched up lungs are weakened by biosurfactants and enable her to breathe in for the first time, and other remarkable things. Biosurfactants produced through fermentation have the potential to outperform traditional surfactants for many tasks, such as cleaning up after oil spills, decontamination ground left toxic by old factories, improving the quality of personal care products like face creams or household products like laundry powders. Not only this, they are also fundamentally more sustainable through their whole life from when they are made to to when they are disposed of. However, the cost of production of biosurfactants is currently far too high to make their widespread use possible - by weight they are ten or a hundred times more expensive to buy than gold. This is because the currently available fermentation production capacity is based around old reactor technology. This research will advance the process engineering science underlying the high cost of biosurfactant production and deliver a coordinated set of solutions which will enable commercial viability, and therefore more widespread exploitation, of biosurfactants.Based on this success, the research group will also work to apply this way of adding new engineering to reduce production cost to a wider range of what could be very useful biologically produced materials, chemicals and fuels and help make them become everyday things like petrol and washing powders are today.

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.

UK electricity generation still relies around 80% on fossil fuels, with a resulting carbon intensity - the amount of carbon emitted to the atmosphere per unit of electricity generated - ten times higher than the level recommended to avoid dangerous climate change. Half of that electricity currently comes for natural gas and is expected to increase in the next decade as new gas-fired generation is commissioned to replace, along with renewables, old inefficient coal plants built in the 1960s. Over 20GW of gas capacity has been permitted since 2007, equivalent to a quarter of the current installed capacity for electricity generation. Unabated (no carbon capture) gas plants produce six to seven the amount of carbon per unit of electricity compared to the levels recommended for UK electricity generation by 2030. They must be fitted with Carbon Capture and Storage to provide reliable low-carbon energy to fill-in gaps between inflexible nuclear and intermittent wind power generation and a fluctuating electricity demand. Gas CCS R&D is an important emerging field, particularly to address the issue of rapidly increasing additional carbon in shale gas reserves, and many of the concepts and underlying scientific principles are still being 'invented'. Ongoing UK infrastructure investments and energy policy decisions are being made which would benefit from better information on relevant gas CCS technologies, making independent, fundamental studies by academic researchers a high priority. The UK is leading Gas CCS deployment with the retrofit of Peterhead power station, as part of the UK CCS Commercialisation programme at the time of writing. Key engineering challenges remain for the second and third tranche of gas CCS projects to be rolled out in the 2020s and 2030s. Efficient and cost-effective integration of CCS with gas turbines would be enhanced and costs of electricity generation greatly reduced if the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the exhaust were much higher than the typical 3-4% value seen in modern Gas Turbine systems. An innovative solution is to selectively recirculate CO2, upstream of the post-combustion CO2 capture process, from the Gas Turbine exhaust back through the inlet of the engine, thereby greatly increasing CO2 concentration and subsequently reducing the burden on the CCS plant. The main result would be a more cost-effective plant with a significantly reduced visual impact. In order to achieve this concept, 3 main challenges must be overcome, which form the basis of the proposed work: 1. Plant Design and Optimisation. Based on advice from manufacturers and research data, a series of scenarios will be considered for the amount of exhaust recirculation through the engine. This will include results from other parts of the project, such as the engine performance tests. 2. GT-CCS Integration. Experimental testing will show how engines and CCS processes function when the two must work in a symbiotic fashion. This will include the measurement of gas turbine burner performance under operational conditions, engine testing, plus experiments on CCS columns to determine their effectiveness with this recirculated exhaust gas. 3. Scale-up and Intensification. Based on the research data gathered in the previous steps, the project will then publish findings on the viability of this concept, including application of this data to set design rules for future GT-CCS plants. Applying this idea further the project will estimate the impact on the UK's energy mix if these plants were considered economically viable. This project has a strong practical basis, employing a variety of state-of-the-art research facilities from 3 well-established UK Universities. These will include measurement of combustion behaviour under high pressure and temperature conditions, performance testing of GT engine sets with recycled exhaust and fundamental studies of the behaviour of CCS columns.

The principal aim of the research proposal is to develop a next generation multi-phase flow instrument to non-invasively measure the phase flow rates, and rapidly image the flow-field distributions, of complex, unsteady two- or three-phase flows. The proposed research is multi-disciplinary covering aspects of fluid mechanics modelling, sensor material selection and flow metering, process tomography and multi-variable data fusion. The new instrument will be based on the novel concepts of 3D vector Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) and the Electromagnetic Velocity Profiler (EVP). These will be used in conjunction with auxiliary differential-pressure measurements for flow density and total flow rate. It is our intention to be able to measure the volumetric flow rate, image time-dependent distributions of the local axial velocity and volume fraction of the dispersed and continuous phases, visualise flow patterns and provide an alternative measurement of volumetric flow rates in two and three phase flows. The project draws upon several recent advances in EIT technology made by the proposers' research teams. Together these potentially enable the development of an advanced flow meter intended to address some limitations of current multiphase flow meters, leading to improvements of the management of productivity in many industrial sectors such as petroleum, petrochemical, food, nuclear and mineral processing. Within the scope of this research, only flows with a conductive continuous liquid phase will be targeted. We will make use of advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) protocols for independent non-invasive validation of both the phase volume fraction and velocity distribution measurements. It is intended that the project will pave the way for the manufacturing of a next generation of advanced multi-phase flow measurement and rapid visualisation technologies.