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.

This study's overarching goal is to create a step change in our understanding of how digitalisation will impact on the pathway to decarbonise the energy sector. The potential of the Internet of Things promoting the integration of Smart appliances, Storage, Smart Contracts or Electrical Vehicles will underpin volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) scenarios that need to be addressed with architectural solutions, new value streams, and necessary frameworks for effective implementations. Within this scoping study we will evaluate five emergent fields (domains) in terms of their innovative directions, potential impact and pace of change in order to prioritize achievable research themes and develop a research framework for future study of their synergies. This process will create a proof of concept systems model for use in analysis of the energy transition, thereby embedding novel analytical approaches based on technologies that we expect to find in operational energy systems in the future. This proof of concept for energy transition will underpin a major collaborative proposal on energy system transition in VUCA scenarios demonstrating how cyber, physical and social systems are seamlessly interwoven. We consider this scoping study is an essential precursor for successful transition to digital data-driven energy futures enhancing people's lives and interactions with their energy environment. The ambition includes identifying opportunities to capture real-world data, such as that from social media, smart meters, which suggest changing and novel patterns of energy supply and demand, and to use this to derive improved transition pathways.

Engineering Design work typically consists of reusing, configuring, and assembling of existing components, solutions and knowledge. It has been suggested that more than 75% of design activity comprises reuse of previously existing knowledge. However in spite of the importance of design reuse activities researchers have estimated that 69% of companies have no systematic approaches to preventing the "reinvention of the wheel". The major issue for supporting design re-use is providing solutions that partially re-use previous designs to satisfy new requirements. Although 3D Search technologies that aim to create "a Google for 3D shapes" have been increasing in capability and speed for over a decade they have not found widespread application and have been referred to as "a solution looking for a problem"! This project is motivated by the belief that, with a new type of user interface, 3D search could be the solutions to the design reuse problem. The system this research is aiming to produce is analogous to the text message systems of mobile phones. On mobile phones 'Predictive text' systems complete words or phrases by matching fragments against dictionaries or phrases used in previous messages. Similarly a 'predictive CAD' system would complete 3D models using 'shape search' technology to interactively match partial CAD features against component databases. In this way the system would prompt the users with fragments of 3D components that complete, or extend, geometry added by the user. Such a system could potential increase design productivity by making the reuse of established designs an efficient part of engineering design. Although feature based retrieval of components from databases of 3D components has been demonstrated by many researchers so far the systems reported have been relatively slow and unable to be components of an interactive design system. However recent breakthroughs in sub-graph matching algorithms have enabled the emergence of a new generation of shape retrieval algorithms, which coupled with multi-core hardware, are now fast enough to support interactive, predictive design interfaces. This proposal aims to investigate the hypothesis that a "Predictive CAD" system would allow engineers to more effectively design new components that incorporate established, or standard, functional or manufacturing geometries. This would find commercial applications within large or distributed engineering organizations. This project is an example of how data mining could potentially be employed to increase design productivity because even small engineering companies will have many hundreds of megabytes of CAD data that a "Predictive CAD" system would effectively pattern match against.

This project is concerned with the development of Ultra High Strength Steels (UHSS - steels with a ultimate tensile strength greater than 1000 MPa) specifically designed to be formed by a novel low energy and flexible manufacturing process, known as 3D roll forming, to produce lightweight crash resistant structures for the automotive industry. The roll forming process is an incremental bending process that turns a flat sheet into a structural profile as compared to traditional stamping processes that involves severe stretching of the sheet to create the required part geometry. The 3D roll forming process is extremely flexible - leading developers of the technology claim a single set of tooling can be used to manufacture up to a quarter of the automotive structure, whereas the stamping process requires an expensive set of tools to be manufactured for each individual part. Furthermore a roll forming line only take 10 to 16 weeks to setup as compared to 18 months for a stamping line. Today ultra high strength automotive steels are usually formed using the energy intensive hot stamping as it is very difficult, and costly, to design steels that achieve the required high room temperature uniform ductility in combination with an ultimate tensile strength in excess of 1000 MPa. As roll forming only requires the material to be bendable, it is proposed that steels with low work hardening rates and a high yield ratio (yield strength /ultimate tensile strength) could be suitable for shaping using this process. The development of UHSS for roll forming allows simpler compositions that are leaner and have a lower alloy cost which reduces exposure to raw materials supply issues (scarcity), have better compatibility with existing capabilities and are more consistent (higher yield/lower scrap). This is potentially a disruptive technology that could revolutionise the manufacture of automotive structural members. It will: eliminate the need for energy intensive hot stamping currently used for shaping UHSS; dramatically reduce tooling requirements and the energy associated in their manufacture; increase material utilisation; avoid the need to use energy intensive materials for lightweighting such as Al, Mg and CFRP; all whilst producing a product that will yield significant CO2 savings during use. It is estimated that if roll formed steel replaced 50 kg of hot stamped components in a vehicle, then 40,000 tonnes of CO2 could be saved in the UK automotive manufacturing industry per annum.

The success of today's global supply networks depends on the efficient and effective communication of design descriptions (including design intent and shape definitions) that suit the requirements and capabilities of the wide range of engineering functions, processes and suppliers involved in the delivery of products to markets. Technical product data packages are used to provide these design descriptions. At a recent industry summit, a representative of Boeing noted that some 40% of the technical data needed to create a product resides outside the shape definitions in the technical product data package. The focus of this project is on the Bills of Materials (BoMs) that are integral parts of both shape definitions and the 40% of non-shape related product data. BoMs are fundamental because they act as integrators: adapting detailed design descriptions to suit the needs of particular engineering processes. The ability to reconfigure BoMs while maintaining internal consistency of the technical data package (where all BoM configurations are complete and compatible with each other) is a major challenge. This proposal builds on a feasibility study that explored the use of embedding* to associate multiple BoMs with a single design description. From an engineering design perspective, based on discussions with four local SMEs and work on a case study related to a Rolls-Royce combustion system, we uncovered an urgent industry need to be able to associate multiple BoMs with one or more design descriptions. This need has remained hidden because current design technologies tend to subsume BoMs in proprietary data representations. However, engineers use BoMs and other design structures to adapt design descriptions for specific purposes. For this reason, new design technologies are needed that make BoMs and other design structures available for engineers to work with directly. From a design technology perspective, we have demonstrated that hypercube lattices can act as computational spaces within which BoMs can be reconfigured. However, the generated lattices are vast and, although we made in excess of hundred-fold improvements in the speed of lattice generation after consultation with the Leeds Advanced Research Computing team, the problem remains exponential in nature. For this project, the lattices will remain in the background, as a part of the technical apparatus. From an organisational psychology perspective, the ability to reconfigure BoMs creates opportunities for new ways of managing engineering knowledge in product development systems that take account of human and organisational behaviours, and individual preferences. The goal of this project is to establish theoretical foundations, validated through a series of sharable software prototypes, to enable the reconfiguration of BoMs. The software prototypes will be designed for use by academic and industrial users to experiment with their own data and build understanding of the kinds of functionality required in such design tools. This will allow companies to better specify their long term information technology requirements for their IT system providers. A staged software engineering process will be used and a series of open source prototypes published at roughly six month intervals. This will create opportunities for meaningful interactions within the research team, and give industry partners early access to the research and opportunities to influence the research direction. In parallel, through the development of case studies in collaboration with industry partners and colleagues in other disciplines, we will build understanding of other types of design structure that occur in engineering design processes and develop cross-disciplinary learning opportunities. * Embedding is a mathematical mechanism that allows one instance of a construct to be superimposed on another.