Welding is one of the most commonly practiced fabrication techniques within manufacturing today. In particular, the manufacture of heavy 5 vessels such as in the nuclear industry from ferritic and austenitic steels is dependent on high quality welding of seams and joints to ensure component integrity and safety. The development of in-process welding Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation (NDT/E) technologies is vital to underpin the safety of such components, but also provide a significant improvement in nuclear manufacturing productivity. Currently, in order to minimise the need for rework of the welded seams and joints, costly, time-consuming, and potentially hazardous mid-manufacture radiography in a dedicated NDT/E bay is used for NDT/E. Mid-manufacture inspection suffers from the need to allow the welded components to cool down, typically up to 4 hours, before transferring to a dedicated NDT/E bay. In-process weld inspection would be able to provide real time indication of defects or abnormalities with the weld permitting immediate further investigation and if necessary corrective actions to be taken. This would have positive impact on facility operation efficiency, avoid costly remedy actions at a later stage, and consequently deliver a reduction in overall testing & rework costs and increased productivity. Currently, there are no such commercial techniques available. The instrument proposed in this project if successful would make a step change in this area andwould have significant impact on the UK manufacturers' productivity for heavy nuclear vessels and their competiveness in the global market.

The applicant's vision is that this fellowship will allow him to build a team of industrially aware academic researchers in infrared (IR) optoelectronics, providing leading research in manufacturing imaging, thermometry and related automation. This will be within a thriving and stimulating multidisciplinary environment, where researchers and industrialists from electronic engineering, signal processing, image processing, molecular materials and engineering research can come together to collaboratively bridge the 'innovation gap' and solve problems that are vitally important to manufacturing. As competition increases with developing nations, manufacturers in the west must increase efficiency, quality and reduce energy costs. 'Smart' instruments that can visually sense their environments, make decisions and communicate over wide areas will be required. The fellowship will allow the applicant to develop the resources, contacts, technology and skills required to meet these requirements. Non-contact IR temperature measurement is an indispensable tool for manufacturing. It can improve product quality, reduce energy consumption, automate processes and make high temperature manufacturing safer. In spite of the great utility of the technique, there are significant barriers to achieving its huge potential. The dominant problem is that thermometers are calibrated using ideal IR radiators, known as blackbody reference furnaces (emissivity>0.995). All real 'bodies' in manufacturing are non-ideal radiators, such as billets of aluminium; where not only are measurement errors of up to 200 Celsius common but it is currently impossible to accurately assess the measurement uncertainty. A two-fold research strategy is proposed. Firstly, the material science of emissivity must be studied on a fundamental level; where emissivity changes during a manufacturing process, algorithms must be developed to account for this change, for all materials that are important to industrial processes, such as titanium, steel, zinc and many more. Secondly, innovations in instrument components must be achieved. Detector inventions have been key to 'step changes' in how IR thermometer technology can be applied; with around one new useful detector to appear commercially every ten years. These slow to market inventions have successively brought practicality, faster measurement speed and sub zero Centigrade measurement. The unique aspect to this proposal the applicant's link with the world leaders in detector research, who's innovations can be brought within IR instruments, moving IR measurement forward as soon as new detector materials are proven, rather than waiting for commercial suppliers to market new technologies. This will open up a vast array of pioneering manufacturing research in automation, image processing and optoelectronics.

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.

"What is the Universe made of, and why?" Sheffield's HEP programme aims to address this fundamental question. There are two problems here: about 5/6 of the matter in the Universe seems to be an as yet undiscovered particle (dark matter), and the remaining 1/6 is all matter - not the 50:50 matter-antimatter mix we make in laboratories. We search for the dark matter particle in two ways: at the energy frontier, by seeking to detect new particles created by the high-energy proton-proton collisions of the LHC at CERN, and in direct searches, attempting to observe these particles in the Galaxy itself. The theory of supersymmetry, which predicts a whole set of particles related to, but more massive than, the known particles of the Standard Model (SM), offers a candidate dark matter particle. If supersymmetric particles can be made at the LHC, they should be detected in ATLAS. Our programme searches specifically for new Higgs bosons and for particles related to the SM quarks and gluons. At ATLAS, we also study SM processes involving the force carriers of the weak interaction, probing our understanding of the SM. Looking to the future, we are contributing essential work to the upgrade of the ATLAS experiment required to take full advantage of higher event rates in future running of the LHC. Most of the matter in our Galaxy is dark matter. In the LZ experiment, we search for evidence of dark matter colliding with Xe atoms in the experiment and causing them to recoil. This experiment will be the most sensitive dark matter detector ever constructed. Understanding possible background - non-dark-matter - events is critical to this, and we have world leading expertise in this field. In addition, we are leading the development of directional dark matter detectors, which will be vital in proving that any candidate signal really does come from the Galaxy and not the Earth. We are also the only UK group involved in the search for axions: another possible type of dark matter particle which cannot be detected at the LHC or in standard dark matter experiments. Why is the matter in the Universe all matter, not antimatter? The answer to this question must lie in subtle differences between particles and antiparticles, an effect called CP violation. The CP violating effects so far observed are not nearly large enough to create the Universe we see. The most likely source for more CP violation is in the interactions of neutrinos. A key observation is that neutrinos have mass, and that different types of neutrinos can interchange their identities in flight. The T2K experiment has made measurements of this, and has detected tantalising hints of CP violation. We plan to build on this work, both in running experiments (T2K and SBND) and in designing the next generation of neutrino experiments which will have much greater sensitivity. We have developed tools to assist the neutrino community in comparing results and improving our understanding of how neutrinos interact. Our access to Boulby Mine provides an invaluable low-background laboratory for testing materials and detector prototypes. Last but not least, we seek to apply HEP technology to industry and to solving global problems. We are using techniques developed for ATLAS to contribute to the development of robotics and to deal with highly radioactive environments such as Chernobyl. We are designing muon detectors to search for nuclear contraband and monitor volcanoes. Our signal processing techniques are being applied to improving medical imaging for heart patients. Our expertise in water Cherenkov neutrino detection is being exploited in an experiment designed to monitor compliance with nuclear non-proliferation treaties. All of this work builds on our STFC core programme to benefit the wider world.

The applicability of metallic powder based production methods such as HIP or additive layer manufacturing (ALM) are restricted by an inability to define the process parameters with sufficient accuracy to provide the quality required for industrial production. Similarly the implementation of the joining technologies needed for component fabrication is limited by a lack of understanding of both the gas-liquid phase interactions and the effect of the solid state phase transformations that occur in the relevant alloy systems. Traditional solutions, based on practical trials and physical assessment, are both costly and time consuming and for the long service lives encountered in the energy and propulsion industries are not feasible while empirically based phenomenological modelling approaches cannot provide the required fidelity. To address these industrial needs a multiscale modelling approach is proposed which combines experimental validation with the application of materials modelling, at the short length scales required to capture the relevant physics, together with the development of techniques to incorporate the predicted behaviour in a consistent manner at higher length scales for application to component level simulations. The multiscale model integration will consist of a number of component parts commencing with new multiphysics based computational fluid dynamics calculations of the short length scale fluid flow and liquid/gas interactions in welding and additive manufacturing. These will provide data on porosity formation which will be combined with cellular automata predictions of grain structure. Novel methods will be developed to combine this fine scale data in a finite element based crystal plasticity framework to define representative volume elements for modelling the macroscopic behaviour in component stress analysis. The component level simulation work will build upon the EPSRC Manufacturing Fellowship of Prof Smith on a whole-life approach to high integrity welding technologies by utilising the knowledge gained on the effect of the microstructural changes imposed by welding. These have a profound influence on a weld's resistance to in-service degradation and upon its sensitivity to the presence of cracking. The microstructural characterisation data available on 316L stainess steel from the Fellowship work will also provide a basis for the model validation. A key part of the developments in this project will be the extension, from typical single value deterministic models, to statistically based descriptions of material properties and process variability. This is a challenging activity but it is essential that modelling tools become capable of predicting the scatter that is seen in real materials. A successful solution will not only generate novel science but will clearly lead to the development of probabilistic lifing methods with risk based outputs for decision making which have clear benefits for industry. This approach provides the prospect of a better understanding of in-service performance of components and welds in both the existing UK nuclear reactor fleet and in any industrial sector where long term structural performance is important. Similar developments in the US have led to a new field known as Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME). This is a multi-disciplinary approach to product design that offers huge economic potential and the successful implementation of ICME will revolutionise the way components are being designed and manufactured. This proposal will address the modelling and design challenge using an ICME based approach on industrial demonstrators of 316L stainless steel HIPped and TIG welded parts. The demonstrators, supplied by the partners from the aerospace and energy industries, will show the benefits that can be achieved in different market sectors. The proposed programme will be the first attempt in the UK to use ICME tools on large industrial scale demonstrators.