The research activity that will be supported by this proposal supports a wide range of advanced materials research and will focus on seven key areas including: *High Speed Additive Manufacturing *Fabrication and Characterisation of Functional Molecular Films *New Frontiers in Material Characterisation *Nuclear Materials *Advanced Nanomaterials and Devices *Polymer Science, Soft Matter and Colloids *Functional Property Characterisation

The UK has recently taken a bold step towards clean growth, consulting on ending the sale of conventional diesel and petrol passenger cars by 2035 and to realise a zero-emissions vehicle fleet by 2050. These ambitions are indeed bold however they place additional pressures on the automotive industry and its supply chain to innovate and highlight concerns about the onwards environmental viability of the existing automotive fleet. Placing aside the obvious scientific, environmental and technical hurdles that must be overcome to deliver mass electrification (assuming that is what is adopted and is the lowest environmental impact), these ambitions stimulate an awareness to reduce the impact of traditional internal combustion engines (ICE) in transportation across all scales. There is a pressing need to raise efficiencies, while reducing the integrated, life-long carbon footprint of the vehicle which prompts scrutiny on fuel efficiency, maintenance frequency, and indeed the impact of all ICE related consumables. To date Lubrizol products, which deliver a significant proportion of the fuel and engine oil additives that are used across all ICE platforms, have directly contributed to and help enable technology which gives notable increases in engine efficiency, in the order of 20% increase in typical MPG, which delivers savings in terms fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. To continue to deliver year-on-year savings in terms of embedded carbon and product performance there is a clear and urgent need to drive harder, in terms of small-molecule, additive design and to innovate in terms of manufacturing and formulation. Furthermore, Lubrizol chemistry reaches beyond ICE transportation and feeds into vehicle electrification and wider end markets, including home and personal care, industrial, and Life Sciences. Indeed, chemistry is at the heart of most products and it is estimated that over 96% of all manufactured goods have chemical industry content, making the industry a major contributor to the UK economy and a key facilitator of change through innovation. This Prosperity Partnership proposal builds on existing strategic relationships with University of Nottingham and University of Warwick to tackle a distinct series of business-led research challenges that are considered "critical path" in terms of Lubrizol technologies, which can only be addressed by assembling a multidisciplinary research team with experts drawn from academia. This partnership will deliver an integrated vision to design Smarter Molecules, using Better Chemistries, and Energy Resilient Processes. Our vision is to use, whenever possible, continuous processing to transform how chemicals are manufactured in Lubrizol and beyond. We aim to minimize the amount of chemicals, solvents and processing steps needed to construct complex molecules. We will achieve this by exploiting atom efficient catalysis to promote more specific chemical transformations and cleaner processes. By linking continuous thermal chemistry and environmentally acceptable solvents, we will create a toolkit with the power to transform all aspects of additive synthesis from initial discovery through to chemical manufacturing of high-value molecules.

The world currently faces a number of crises, but none more potentially devastating than climate change. Perversely, it has been during the period of the global pandemic that any remaining doubts that man is not responsible have seemingly evaporated. During this period, the occurrence of extreme weather patterns appear to have proliferated with headline news reporting on floods, heatwaves, forest fires, hurricanes/tornados and the continuing documentation of melting ice sheets. All is a consequence of use of fossils fuels for our energy and chemicals manufacture and the consequent emissions of the Greenhouse gas (GHG), carbon dioxide (CO2). Whilst it is conceivable that the ingenuity of humankind can expand our array of alternative energy sources (wind, solar, hydro, battery power) to a level that dispense with the need for using fossil fuels for energy and heating, modern society is entirely reliant on the chemicals and materials that are currently derived from oil. Almost everything that surrounds us that is not made of metal, wood, stone, glass, wool or cotton is made from oil. That includes plastics, carpets, clothing, shoes, cosmetics, medicines, wind turbine blades, boats, etc. Accordingly, one of the greatest challenges facing society is the future sustainable production of chemicals from non-petrochemical resources while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The solution is to derive processes that can convert plant material, or biomass, into the chemicals and materials we need. This may be accomplished by microbial fermentation processes wherein the biomass is broken down either through the action of hydrolytic enzymes into simple sugars or through the action of heat into simple single carbon gases CO and CO2 and hydrogen. The latter process is called gasification, and the gas mixture generated referred to as synthesis gas or syngas. These simple forms of carbon, sugar or syngas, may then be fermented by microbes into a desired product. A simple example would be making beer, where the yeast microbe converts sugar into ethanol. The exploitation of biomass in this way will feature prominently in meeting the UKs NetZero targets. Theoretically, any microbe can be engineered to make any chemical. However, traditional, carbohydrate-based fermentation processes, such as ethanol production, waste more than one third of the carbon which is not incorporated into the product but lost in the form of CO2. Eliminating this loss would ablate the emission of a greenhouse gas that is inherent to microbial fermentations and dramatically improve productivity, potentially by greater than 50%. This project, NO CARBON LOST, explicitly sets out to develop microbes and processes that grow on the deconstructed biomass with releasing CO2 and makes more product. The foundations of our strategy were initiated during lockdown and draw on current activity at SBRC Nottingham related to exploitation of gaseous and sugar feedstocks. We will use monocultures to exploit a platform bacterial strain to make an alcohol from biomass-derived sugars or syngas while at the same time while simultaneously fixing CO2. In parallel, we will use an artificial synthetic, community comprising an engineered biomass-degrading bacterium and a Co2-consumimg microbe, to make the desired products (an alcohol and a volatile fatty acid) without CO2 production. We will also produce a biodegradable plastic using a combination of the two. The project will be underpinned by computerised modelling of the processes in operation. The work undertaken will be carefully monitored and ensured to undertaken in a socially acceptable manner. NO CARBON LOST seeks to build on the knowledge and capabilities of SBRC Nottingham in engineering the biology of gas fermenting chassis to introduce a step-change in fermentation processes traditionally used with carbohydrate feedstocks, further reducing the carbon footprint of biomass exploitation.

Engineering machines, from car and planes, to power stations and production lines, have lots of moving parts. The reliability of these parts is key to the function and energy efficiency the machine. It is often these moving parts that fail and frequently that failure is associated with the rubbing surfaces. Machine elements like bearings, gears, seals, and pistons often wear out, exhibit high friction, or seize. Knowing if a machine element is performing at its optimum can save energy and lead to long life. Being able to monitor the components in-situ in a machine can speed up the development cycle time. Further, monitoring performance rather than failure, allows allows the machine operator to plan maintenance. This is particularly important for high capital cost machines, in remote locations, like offshore wind turbines. Current monitoring methods are based around measuring excessive vibration or the noise emitted by a failed component (acoustic emission AE) or by counting wear debris particles in a lubricant. Sensors that measure performance rather than failure, and so can be used to optimise operating parameters would be much more useful. This also opens the possibility of using advanced control based on sensor readings, Many machine components are commodities, and integrating sensors provides a way to add value to what would otherwise be a commodity product. The Leonardo Centre at Sheffield has developed unique methods for measuring machine contacts in-situ. The approaches are based on ultrasonic technologies adapted from the NDT and dynamics communities. By sending ultrasonic pulses through machine components and measuring transmission and reflection we have been able to non-invasively study various tribological machine components. In early work we developed methods to measure the oil film thickness, and the amount of metal contact. This has been well established, validated in laboratory experiments, and applied to journal bearings, trust pads, rolling bearings, pistons, and seals. Several industrial companies have adopted these approaches in their product development cycles. This fellowship seeks to explore new methods to learn more about contacts. Buy using different kinds of ultrasonic waves, transducer topologies, and signal processing we will develop methods to measure contact load, stress history, oil viscosity, and friction. These will be prototyped in the laboratory and we have industrial partners ready to provide field applications. In addition the fellowship seeks to collaborate with academic institutions; firstly to learn new acoustic sensor techniques and secondly to support research into machine element research with the provision of new measurement methods. This will support the Leonardo Centre aim to be, not only the leading centre for ultrasonic measurement in tribology, but to be a key part of the UK's research infrastructure in machine component research and development both in industry and academia.

Crystallisation is a fascinating process. From common observations such as the formation of ice on a window or scale in a kettle, crystallisation is important to virtually every area of science, and lies at the heart of processes as varied as the production of ceramics, pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, nanomaterials and biominerals. Equally important is the prevention of unwanted crystallisation in the form of weathering, scale or kidney stones. Only by understanding how materials crystallise can we hope to control these processes. Despite the importance of crystallisation, we still have a poor understanding of many of the mechanisms that underlie this fundamental phenomenon. This is due to the fact that crystallisation is governed by molecular scale processes that are very difficult to study experimentally. For example, while experiments can identify reaction conditions that generate specific crystal polymorphs, they cannot alone explain why this occurred. This Programme Grant will couple experiment and theory to address this challenge. Our experimental programme brings to the fore such frontier analytical techniques as liquid-phase TEM and functional scanning probe microscopies that will allow us to study the changes in solid and solution during crystallisation as never before. With recent advances in modelling we shall be able to perform simulations of nucleation and growth processes on comparable time- and length-scales, providing a unique opportunity to fully understand crystal nucleation and growth at the nanoscale. These studies will be linked to simpler bulk experiments to provide a holistic view of crystallisation in the real world. We will use this approach to address six major challenges in the crystallisation of inorganic compounds. Each challenge, as well as being of fundamental importance, is ultimately significant to industry and has practical applications as varied as scale prevention in dishwashers, dental remineralisation and tailoring particle shape for paper coatings. Investigations of homogeneous crystallisation in bulk solution will lay the foundation for our nucleation studies, revealing how we can direct nucleation pathways by varying solution and environmental conditions. We will then build on this work to explore the fascinating question of polymorphism, giving us predictive understanding of conditions which deliver specific crystal polymorphs. Turning then to the ubiquitous phenomenon of surface-directed crystallisation, both theory and cutting-edge analytical methods will bring new understanding of how surfaces - and the changes they cause in the adjacent solution - govern crystallisation. This naturally leads us to a search for effective nucleating agents, which, despite the promises of classical nucleation theory, are known for only a small number of systems. Control of crystal growth to generate particles with defined shapes and sizes is another topic of great industrial importance, and soluble additives are widely used to achieve this goal. By understanding crystal/ additive interactions we aim to pre-select additives to grow crystals with target properties, or to inhibit unwanted crystallisation. Finally, we will study crystallisation within confined volumes; this will ultimately enable us to use confinement to control crystallisation. These ambitious objectives can only be met within the framework of a Programme Grant, which provides the flexibility and long-term funding to bring together the very different disciplines of theory and experiment. While each of the individual tasks focuses on a distinct problem in crystallisation, they are intimately linked over the entire project by common methods and understanding, and developments in one task will drive advances in others.