This is an application for a Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) from the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester in Advanced Metallic Systems which will be directed by Prof Panos Tsakiropoulos and Prof Phil Prangnell. The proposed DTC is in response to recent reviews by the EPSRC and government/industrial bodies which have indentified the serious impact of an increasing shortage of personnel, with Doctorate level training in metallic materials, on the global competitiveness of the UK's manufacturing and defence capability. Furthermore, future applications of materials are increasingly being seen as systems that incorporate several material classes and engineered surfaces into single components, to increase performance.The primary goal of the DTC is to address these issues head on by supplying the next generation of metallics research specialists desperately needed by UK plc. We plan to attract talented students from a diverse range of physical science and engineering backgrounds and involve them with highly motivated academic staff in a variety of innovative teaching and industrial-based research activities. The programme aims to prepare graduates for global challenges in competitiveness, through an enhanced PhD programme that will:1. Challenge students and promote independent problem solving and interdiscpilnarity,2. Expose them to industrial innovation, exciting new science and the international research community, 3. Increase their fundamental skills, and broaden them as individuals in preparation for future management and leadership roles.The DTC will be aligned with major multidisciplinary research centres and with the strong involvement of NAMTEC (the National Metals Technology Centre) and over twenty companies across many sectors. Learning will be up to date and industrially relevant, as well as benefitting from access to 30M of state-of-the art research facilities.Research projects will be targeted at high value UK strategic technology sectors, such as aerospace, automotive, power generation, renewables, and defence and aim to:1. Provide a multidisciplinary approach to the whole product life cycle; from raw material, to semi finished products to forming, joining, surface engineering/coating, in service performance and recycling via the wide skill base of the combined academic team and industrial collaborators.2. Improve the basic understanding of how nano-, micro- and meso-scale physical processes control material microstructures and thereby properties, in order to radically improve industrial processes, and advance techniques of modelling and process simulation.3. Develop new innovative processes and processing routes, i.e. disruptive or transformative technologies.4. Address challenges in energy by the development of advanced metallic solutions and manufacturing technologies for nuclear power, reduced CO2 emissions, and renewable energy. 5. Study issues and develop techniques for interfacing metallic materials into advanced hybrid structures with polymers, laminates, foams and composites etc. 6. Develop novel coatings and surface treatments to protect new light alloys and hybrid structures, in hostile environments, reduce environmental impact of chemical treatments and add value and increase functionality. 7. Reduce environmental impact through reductions in process energy costs and concurrently develop new materials that address the environmental challenges in weight saving and recyclability technologies. This we believe will produce PhD graduates with a superior skills base enabling problem solving and leadership expertise well beyond a conventional PhD project, i.e. a DTC with a structured programme and stimulating methods of engagement, will produce internationally competitive doctoral graduates that can engage with today's diverse metallurgical issues and contribute to the development of a high level knowledge-based UK manufacturing sector.

Nuclear energy, derived from splitting the atom, is an important component of current UK electricity generation because it is low carbon and it is not affected by the weather. In order for the UK to reach its commitment for net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, nuclear power offers a way to offset the UK's previous reliance on electricity production by burning of coal and gas, whilst underpinning periods when renewable sources of electricity (off-shore wind and solar) are interrupted. The fuel from which nuclear energy is derived currently is made from uranium. Fuel for all but one of the UK's existing nuclear power stations is manufactured at Westinghouse Springfields Fuels Ltd., near Preston. However, in the next 10 years, all of these power stations are scheduled to close. In order to offset this loss in low-carbon electricity, new reactor designs are being considered because the requirements of nuclear power have changed since the current generation of operating reactors were built in the 1960s-1980s: modular designs are favoured now in place of large reactors built at site, that will be easier and cheaper to build, and which provide more flexibility over the power that they provide. In the short-term, the UK is considering small modular reactors 'SMRs', that are smaller versions of a long-established design, and advanced modular reactors 'AMRs', which will operate at higher efficiencies at higher temperatures. The UK is well-placed to compete for the manufacture of the fuel for these new reactors because Springfields has more flexibility concerning the range in uranium composition open to it than many of its competitors, but it will need to be competitive on cost. A principal opportunity to reduce the cost of nuclear fuel manufacture is to reduce the likelihood that fuel produced in the factory is not compliant with customer requirements. When this happens, the fuel has to be recycled through the process, unnecessary energy is consumed in recycling it, time is lost and waste is generated. In this research we shall study the uranium manufacturing process in the UK with the aim to investigate whether it can be made responsive to change in order to increase its efficiency and cost effectiveness. We have selected two examples where unexpected change can undermine compliance: uranium enrichment and pellet quality. Uranium enrichment concerns the proportion of 235U present in the fuel; 235U is the isotope that is responsible for most of the energy that is generated. It is a key component of the fuel specification and, because enrichment is not constant across a reactor core, the enrichment of each pellet matters. Enrichment is influenced by changes in the feedstock (uranium hexafluoride) and by faults that might evolve in the manufacturing machinery. We will explore whether the most advanced ways of detecting gamma rays available today can be employed to yield a measurement of enrichment at various points in the process. We will explore whether these measurements can be used to constitute data to be used to adjust the process to avert a change in enrichment, so that the effect on the enrichment of a given pellet can be minimised and hence the need for a whole batch to be recycled is removed. Pellet quality is premised on several factors: one is whether it is cracked or not. Pellets are checked by a variety of means including manually by experts at the end of the manufacturing process. At this stage microscopic cracks can be present occurring after the pellets are baked implying that they could be weakened beyond what is suitable for use in a reactor or that their thermal conductivity may not be uniform etc. We shall explore the use of hyperspectral and high-resolution imaging for this purpose, with the aim of deriving data for use in rendering the process responsive, so that, for example, an evolving flaw in a machine that is causing cracking can be removed before a whole batch is affected.

This project is a collaborative effort between universities, a national laboratory, and industry partners across the US and UK. The project aims to assess the benefits and implications of using Accident-Tolerant (or Advanced Technology) Fuels, or ATFs, in a variety of Small Modular Reactor (SMR) designs. ATFs have the potential to significantly improve safety and economic performance of reactors. The increased safety margin that they offer can be translated into either more straightforward and short licencing process, and relaxation of requirements on safety equipment, or substantial power uprate, or both - all ultimately leading to cost savings. Multiple ATF concepts have been proposed in recent years, offering a range of potential performance improvements. Their technology readiness level, however, also varies widely - from conceptual ideas to nearly commercially available products already being marketed to the industry. SMR designs are equally diverse. Even though they may share many features of Light Water Reactor technology, they differ substantially in size, coolant circulation driving force (natural or forced convection), arrangement of primary coolant loop components (integral or loop), approach to reactivity control etc. Therefore, the benefits ATFs can offer if used in these SMRs will differ. The main objective of this project is to quantify these benefits for a subset of promising SMR-ATF combinations. UK Government have committed significant financial support to the development of SMR technology proposed by Rolls-Royce as part of its overall net-zero decarbonisation strategy. Furthermore, substantial expertise in nuclear fuel manufacturing and other fuel cycle services are considered strategic assets for the UK. The UK research team contributing to this project in partnership with Rolls-Royce and Westinghouse-Springfields will focus on the analysis of ATF options applied to the UK-based Rolls-Royce SMR. We will assess and compare the ATF options with respect to their in-core neutronic and thermal-hydraulic behaviour under normal operation, transients, and accident conditions, as well as compare their effects on the back end of the fuel cycle. This project will help to guide the future Rolls-Royce SMR and ATF development effort both nationally and internationally.

The early years of the 21st century have seen energy policy return to the political agenda both in the UK and internationally. Growing concerns about environmental, economic and social issues associated with energy production (climate change, the depletion of hydrocarbon resources, declining public trust in science and technology and increasing energy prices) have led to a reappraisal of the wider energy scene and of individual energy technologies. The return of various nuclear power options to the list of candidate technologies being actively considered is but one element of this change. One potential advantage of nuclear power is that it may help us to reduce CO2 emissions and therefore mitigate some of the climate change concerns, However, it is far from clear how sustainable the nuclear option is overall, compared to other generating options. Issues such as health and safety, investment risks, security, public trust and perception are also important for understanding of the full sustainability implications of nuclear generation. Furthermore, the nuclear power industry is faced with many uncertainties, including financial, technical and regulatory. Decommissioning and high-level waste disposal are prime examples of areas where these uncertainties exist. The public attitude toward nuclear power in general ranges from ambivalent to negative; there is, however, a growing public awareness and concern about the impacts of global warming which may start to influence the change in public opinion. Therefore, any decisions about the future of nuclear power will need to take into account these and other relevant issues, taking an integrated, balanced and impartial approach to evaluating the relative environmental, economic, social and political sustainability of nuclear power.This project proposes to develop such an integrated approach and apply it to sustainability appraisals of nuclear power relative to other energy options. The main objectives of the project are:1. development of a rigorous, robust and transparent multicriteria decision-support framework for sustainability assessment of energy options;2. sustainability assessments of the nuclear option within an integrated energy system;3. engagement with and communication of the results of research to relevant stakeholders.The outputs of the project will help to inform the debate on the future of nuclear power in the UK.

Nuclear technology is, by definition, based around the principle of subatomic physics and the interaction of radiation particles with materials. Whilst the microscopic behaviour of such systems is well understood, the degree of inhomogeneity involved means that the ability to predict the flux of particles through complex physical environments on the macroscopic (human) scale is a significant challenge. This lies at the heart of how we design, regulate and operate some of the most important technologies for the twenty-first century. This includes building new reactors (fission and fusion), decommissioning old ones, medical radiation therapy, as well as opening the way forward into space technologies through e.g. the development of space-bound mini-reactors for off-world bases and protection for high-tech equipment exposed to high-energy radiation such as satellites and spacesuits. Accurate prediction of how radiation interacts with surrounding matter is based on modelling through the so-called Boltzmann transport equation (BTE). Many of the existing methods used in this field date back decades and rely on principles of simulated (e.g. neutron) particle counting obtained by Monte Carlo and other numerical methods. Input from the mathematical sciences community since the 1980s has been limited. In the meantime, various mathematical theories have since emerged that present the opportunity for entirely new approaches. Together with powerful modern HPC and smarter algorithms, they have the capacity to handle significantly more complex scenarios e.g. time dependence, rare-event sampling and variance reduction as well as multi-physics modelling. This five-year interdisciplinary programme of research will combine modern mathematical methods from probability theory, advanced Monte Carlo methods and inverse problems to develop novel approaches to the theory and application of radiation transport. We will pursue an interactive exploration of foundational, translational and application-driven research; developing predictive models with quantifiable accuracy and software prototypes, ready for real-world implementation in the energy, healthcare and space nuclear industries. This programme grant will unite complementary research groups from mathematics, engineering and medical physics, leading to sustained critical mass in academic knowledge and expertise. Through a diverse team of researchers, we will lead advances in radiation modelling that are disruptive to the current paradigm, ensuring that the UK is at the forefront of the 21st century nuclear industry.