The nuclear industry has some of the most extreme environments in the world, with radiation levels and other hazards frequently restricting human access to facilities. Even when human entry is possible, the risks can be significant and very low levels of productivity. To date, robotic systems have had limited impact on the nuclear industry, but it is clear that they offer considerable opportunities for improved productivity and significantly reduced human risk. The nuclear industry has a vast array of highly complex and diverse challenges that span the entire industry: decommissioning and waste management, Plant Life Extension (PLEX), Nuclear New Build (NNB), small modular reactors (SMRs) and fusion. Whilst the challenges across the nuclear industry are varied, they share many similarities that relate to the extreme conditions that are present. Vitally these similarities also translate across into other environments, such as space, oil and gas and mining, all of which, for example, have challenges associated with radiation (high energy cosmic rays in space and the presence of naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) in mining and oil and gas). Major hazards associated with the nuclear industry include radiation; storage media (for example water, air, vacuum); lack of utilities (such as lighting, power or communications); restricted access; unstructured environments. These hazards mean that some challenges are currently intractable in the absence of solutions that will rely on future capabilities in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI). Reliable robotic systems are not just essential for future operations in the nuclear industry, but they also offer the potential to transform the industry globally. In decommissioning, robots will be required to characterise facilities (e.g. map dose rates, generate topographical maps and identify materials), inspect vessels and infrastructure, move, manipulate, cut, sort and segregate waste and assist operations staff. To support the life extension of existing nuclear power plants, robotic systems will be required to inspect and assess the integrity and condition of equipment and facilities and might even be used to implement urgent repairs in hard to reach areas of the plant. Similar systems will be required in NNB, fusion reactors and SMRs. Furthermore, it is essential that past mistakes in the design of nuclear facilities, which makes the deployment of robotic systems highly challenging, do not perpetuate into future builds. Even newly constructed facilities such as CERN, which now has many areas that are inaccessible to humans because of high radioactive dose rates, has been designed for human, rather than robotic intervention. Another major challenge that RAIN will grapple with is the use of digital technologies within the nuclear sector. Virtual and Augmented Reality, AI and machine learning have arrived but the nuclear sector is poorly positioned to understand and use these rapidly emerging technologies. RAIN will deliver the necessary step changes in fundamental robotics science and establish the pathways to impact that will enable the creation of a research and innovation ecosystem with the capability to lead the world in nuclear robotics. While our centre of gravity is around nuclear we have a keen focus on applications and exploitation in a much wider range of challenging environments.

Manufacture Using Advanced Powder Processes - MAPP Conventional materials shaping and processing are hugely wasteful and energy intensive. Even with well-structured materials circulation strategies in place to recondition and recycle process scrap, the energy use, CO2 emitted and financial costs associated are ever more prohibitive and unacceptable. We can no longer accept the traditional paradigm of manufacturing where excess energy use and high levels of recycling / down cycling of expensive and resource intensive materials are viewed as inevitable and the norm and must move to a situation where 100% of the starting material is incorporated into engineering products with high confidence in the final critical properties. MAPP's vision is to deliver on the promise of powder-based manufacturing processes to provide low energy, low cost, and low waste high value manufacturing route and products to secure UK manufacturing productivity and growth. MAPP will deliver on the promise of advanced powder processing technologies through creation of new, connected, intelligent, cyber-physical manufacturing environments to achieve 'right first time' product manufacture. Achieving our vision and realising the potential of these technologies will enable us to meet our societal goals of reducing energy consumption, materials use, and CO2 emissions, and our economic goals of increasing productivity, rebalancing the UK's economy, and driving economic growth and wealth creation. We have developed a clear strategy with a collaborative and interdisciplinary research and innovation programme that focuses our collective efforts to deliver new understanding, actions and outcomes across the following themes: 1) Particulate science and innovation. Powders will become active and designed rather than passive elements in their processing. Control of surface state, surface chemistry, structure, bulk chemistry, morphologies and size will result in particles designed for process efficiency / reliability and product performance. Surface control will enable us to protect particles out of process and activate them within. Understanding the influence between particle attributes and processing will widen the limited palette of materials for both current and future manufacturing platforms. 2) Integrated process monitoring, modelling and control technologies. New approaches to powder processing will allow us to handle the inherent variability of particulates and their stochastic behaviours. Insights from advanced in-situ characterisation will enable the development of new monitoring technologies that assure quality, and coupled to modelling approaches allow optimisation and control. Data streaming and processing for adaptive and predictive real-time control will be integral in future manufacturing platforms increasing productivity and confidence. 3) Sustainable and future manufacturing technologies. Our approach will deliver certainty and integrity with final products at net or near net shape with reduced scrap, lower energy use, and lower CO2 emissions. Recoupling the materials science with the manufacturing science will allow us to realise the potential of current technologies and develop new home-grown manufacturing processes, to secure the prosperity of UK industry. MAPP's focused and collaborative research agenda covers emerging powder based manufacturing technologies: spark plasma sintering (SPS), freeze casting, inkjet printing, layer-by-layer manufacture, hot isostatic pressing (HIP), and laser, electron beam, and indirect additive manufacturing (AM). MAPP covers a wide range of engineering materials where powder processing has the clear potential to drive disruptive growth - including advanced ceramics, polymers, metals, with our initial applications in aerospace and energy sectors - but where common problems must be addressed.

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 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.

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.