Many industrial formulations that form part of our daily lives are complex mixtures. These include food, hygiene and laundry products, paints, etc. In many of these systems small molecules migrating to and across interfaces (that are either exposed to atmosphere or buried in bulk) leads to undesired effects. These might include adhesive loss in hygiene products, poor flavour perception, and release of undesired chemicals to the atmosphere. This project is aimed at developing a software toolkit for understanding small molecule migration in complex fluid mixtures that have many ingredients. Our ambition is to go far beyond the very simple model systems for which molecular migration has previously been characterised, and to address the complexities that arise when migration occurs in products that have structure, or are evolving with time. This brings fascinating but subtle challenges which are not only stimulating fundamental problems, but underpin 'real world' issues such as shelf-life of detergent formulations, durability of coatings and even how our food tastes when we chew it. We have developed this proposal in close collaboration with 3 industrial partners (P&G, AkzoNobel and Mondelez) who represent three very different sectors of the consumer goods industry, yet have in common the need to control migration in structured products. Despite working on entirely different product ranges, scientists in these companies share a remarkable range of problems that can be addressed by answering 3 key questions: Q1. How does the depth profile of wetting layers and subsurface concentrations depend on bulk phase composition and molecular interactions? Q2. What is the surface structure resulting from lateral migration? Q3. What are the timescales and mechanisms associated with migration and formation of surface structures? We will tackle these questions for a variety of carefully defined model formulations to isolate influences of polarity, charge, hydrophobicity, elasticity and deformation, in a series of fundamental studies. The project will deliver fundamental science knowledge along with a predictive model toolkit, ready to be embedded in the research programmes of soft matter scientists and technologists. We will work with our industrial partners throughout the project to ensure successful implementation of these models to allow them to exploit this work in their R&D programmes, and make the deliverables available to wider downstream users through a supported software website and the National Formulation Centre. Solving these problems will pave the way to efficient formulations that offer reduced waste improved performance and stability in consumer goods.

The UK Foundation Industries (Glass, Metals, Cement, Ceramics, Bulk Chemicals and Paper), are worth £52B to the UK economy, produce 28 million tonnes of materials per year and account for 10% of the UK total CO2 emissions. These industries face major challenges in meeting the UK Government's legal commitment for 2050 to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 100% relative to 1990, as they are characterised by highly intensive use of both resources and energy. While all sectors are implementing steps to increase recycling and reuse of materials, they are at varying stages of creating road maps to zero carbon. These roadmaps depend on the switching of the national grid to low carbon energy supply based on green electricity and sustainable sources of hydrogen and biofuels along with carbon capture and storage solutions. Achievement of net zero carbon will also require innovations in product and process design and the adoption of circular economy and industrial symbiosis approaches via new business models, enabled as necessary by changes in national and global policies. Additionally, the Governments £4.7B National Productivity Investment Fund recognises the need for raising UK productivity across all industrial sectors to match best international standards. High levels of productivity coupled with low carbon strategies will contribute to creating a transformation of the foundation industry landscape, encouraging strategic retention of the industries in the UK, resilience against global supply chain shocks such as Covid-19 and providing quality jobs and a clean environment. The strategic importance of these industries to UK productivity and environmental targets has been acknowledged by the provision of £66M from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund to support a Transforming Foundation Industries cluster. Recognising that the individual sectors will face many common problems and opportunities, the TFI cluster will serve to encourage and facilitate a cross sectoral approach to the major challenges faced. As part of this funding an Academic Network Plus will be formed, to ensure the establishment of a vibrant community of academics and industry that can organise and collaborate to build disciplinary and interdisciplinary solutions to the major challenges. The Network Plus will serve as a basis to ensure that the ongoing £66M TFI programme is rolled out, underpinned by a portfolio of the best available UK interdisciplinary science, and informed by cross sectoral industry participation. Our network, initially drawn from eight UK universities, and over 30 industrial organisations will support the UK foundation industries by engaging with academia, industry, policy makers and non-governmental organisations to identify and address challenges and opportunities to co-develop and adopt transformative technologies, business models and working practices. Our expertise covers all six foundation industries, with relevant knowledge of materials, engineering, bulk chemicals, manufacturing, physical sciences, informatics, economics, circular economy and the arts & humanities. Through our programme of mini-projects, workshops, knowledge transfer, outreach and dissemination, the Network will test concepts and guide the development of innovative outcomes to help transform UK foundation industries. The Network will be inclusive across disciplines, embracing best practice in Knowledge Exchange from the Arts and Humanities, and inclusive of the whole UK academic and industrial communities, enabling access for all to the activity programme and project fund opportunities.

A majority of engineering and environmental flows occur over surfaces that exhibit spatial variations in roughness and/or topography. When a turbulent wall-flow evolves over such surfaces, it may exhibit unusual physical properties, depending on the relationship between the dominant length-scales of the surface and that of the flow. Specifically, when the dominant length-scale(s) of the surface in the cross-stream direction become(s) comparable to the dominant length-scale of the flow (such as boundary layer thickness or water-depth), then the flow also exhibits large-scale spatial heterogeneity that is locked-on to the surface heterogeneity. This flow heterogeneity is expressed in the form of localised secondary currents (SCs) that often extend across the entire depth of the flow and manifest themselves as large 'time-averaged' streamwise vortices accompanied by low- and high-speed regions. This surface-induced flow heterogeneity invalidates some of the fundamental tenets of turbulent wall-flows that were developed for flows over homogeneous surfaces. Therefore, current predictive tools that rely on these tenets can neither accurately predict nor offer insights into the complex physics of flows that contain surface-induced SCs. The significant effects of surface-induced SCs have recently been recognised in at least two disparate areas: 1) Performance of engineering systems such as in-service turbine blades, bio-fouled ship hulls and flow control; and 2) Understanding of the river flow dynamics with applications in flood management, eco-hydraulics and sediment transport. Over recent years, Southampton, Aberdeen, Glasgow and UCL have invested considerable efforts in advancing both these areas. Given the burgeoning interest in this topic, it would be timely to harness the synergies between these four leading groups to develop comprehensive understanding of turbulent flows in the presence of surface-induced SCs and establish a novel transformative framework to predict such flows. This project will leverage the expertise, domain knowledge and infrastructure of four leading groups in the above-mentioned areas to bring about a paradigm shift in our approach to flows over heterogeneous surfaces that generate secondary currents. A comprehensive series of physical experiments (at Southampton & Aberdeen) and complementary numerical simulations (at Glasgow & UCL) will be performed to generate unprecedented data on surface-induced SCs. We will compare and contrast the behaviour of SCs across all four canonical wall-flows (boundary layers, open-channels, pipes and closed-channels) for the first time. The obtained data will underpin identification and validation of potential universalities (and differences) in drag mechanisms and momentum/energy transfer in these flows in the presence of surface-induced SCs. Synthesising the insights obtained from the data, a new framework leading to physics-informed semi-empirical and and theoretically-based numerical models will be developed to predict and optimise the influence of surface-induced SCs on turbulent wall-flows relevant to engineering/environmental applications.

The Transforming the Foundation Industries Challenge has set out the background of the six foundation industries; cement, ceramics, chemicals, glass, metals and paper, which produce 28 Mt pa (75% of all materials in our economy) with a value of £52Bn but also create 10% of UK CO2 emissions. These materials industries are the root of all supply chains providing fundamental products into the industrial sector, often in vertically-integrated fashion. They have a number of common factors: they are water, resource and energy-intensive, often needing high temperature processing; they share processes such as grinding, heating and cooling; they produce high-volume, often pernicious waste streams, including heat; and they have low profit margins, making them vulnerable to energy cost changes and to foreign competition. Our Vision is to build a proactive, multidisciplinary research and practice driven Research and Innovation Hub that optimises the flows of all resources within and between the FIs. The Hub will work with communities where the industries are located to assist the UK in achieving its Net Zero 2050 targets, and transform these industries into modern manufactories which are non-polluting, resource efficient and attractive places to be employed. TransFIRe is a consortium of 20 investigators from 12 institutions, 49 companies and 14 NGO and government organisations related to the sectors, with expertise across the FIs as well as energy mapping, life cycle and sustainability, industrial symbiosis, computer science, AI and digital manufacturing, management, social science and technology transfer. TransFIRe will initially focus on three major challenges: 1 Transferring best practice - applying "Gentani": Across the FIs there are many processes that are similar, e.g. comminution, granulation, drying, cooling, heat exchange, materials transportation and handling. Using the philosophy Gentani (minimum resource needed to carry out a process) this research would benchmark and identify best practices considering resource efficiencies (energy, water etc.) and environmental impacts (dust, emissions etc.) across sectors and share information horizontally. 2 Where there's muck there's brass - creating new materials and process opportunities. Key to the transformation of our Foundation Industries will be development of smart, new materials and processes that enable cheaper, lower-energy and lower-carbon products. Through supporting a combination of fundamental research and focused technology development, the Hub will directly address these needs. For example, all sectors have material waste streams that could be used as raw materials for other sectors in the industrial landscape with little or no further processing. There is great potential to add more value by "upcycling" waste by further processes to develop new materials and alternative by-products from innovative processing technologies with less environmental impact. This requires novel industrial symbioses and relationships, sustainable and circular business models and governance arrangements. 3 Working with communities - co-development of new business and social enterprises. Large volumes of warm air and water are produced across the sectors, providing opportunities for low grade energy capture. Collaboratively with communities around FIs, we will identify the potential for co-located initiatives (district heating, market gardening etc.). This research will highlight issues of equality, diversity and inclusiveness, investigating the potential from societal, environmental, technical, business and governance perspectives. Added value to the project comes from the £3.5 M in-kind support of materials and equipment and use of manufacturing sites for real-life testing as well as a number of linked and aligned PhDs/EngDs from HEIs and partners This in-kind support will offer even greater return on investment and strongly embed the findings and operationalise them within the sector.

High-solid-content dispersions of solid particles of size about 1-50 microns in a liquid phase (HSCDs) occur ubiquitously in industrial applications, from cement and ceramic pastes to catalyst washcoats, paints, foods and drilling fluids. The reliable and efficient processing and manufacture of these diverse products presents 'grand challenges' to formulation technology because at high solids volume fraction process flow and product behaviour become increasingly unstable and unpredictable. But achieving high volume fraction is often desirable in many applications: in generic process flow, to maintain throughput and cut energy/materials costs; in ceramics manufacture, higher volume fraction green bodies sinter to mechanically stronger products; increasing volume fraction of a slurry for spray drying reduces drying time; higher volume fraction drilling fluids reduce problems of fluid and gas influx and collapse in bore holes. Conversely, unstable flow at large viscosity is sometimes actually desirable, as long as it is predictable, e.g., in breaking aggregates to disperse catalytic converter washcoats or pigments in a mixer. In all these applications and many others the ability to control and predict rheology for a given formulation--to 'dial up' required behaviour--would transform formulation science and practice with HSCDs. However, experience repeatedly shows that as volume fraction increases, the flow and stress become increasingly unstable, and characterization, measurement, control and prediction increasingly challenging and unreliable. Conventional rheological characterization of HSCDs is often poorly reproducible and also fails to predict correct flow behaviour in the complex, non-rheometric geometries encountered in applications. Notoriously, small changes beyond the manufacturer's control, e.g. due to unforeseen variations in processing conditions or a change in supplier, can have catastrophic effects (e.g. a normally flowable formulation can suddenly fracture rather than flow). On top of this, industrial applications span many length scales, from < 100-particle-diameter extrusion mouldings and printed films to kilometre-deep bore holes so that predicting and characterizing HSCD flow faces the simultaneous requirements of scale up and scale down. Faced with these ubiquitous challenges, and because the basic science of flow at high volume fraction is not understood and predictive engineering tools are not established, formulators often resort to accumulated experience and informal procedures such as 'finger rheology' (rubbing samples between fingers!) to guide their work. Thus, existing formulations are often sub-optimal, and problems arising from these formulations are solved mostly by trial and error, while the risk associated with formulation innovation severely limits development of new products and processes. Our vision, inspired by recent major scientific advances by members of the project team, is to transform practice in the formulation of HSCDs through a tight collaboration of researchers and major multi-sector industry partners. Our new scientific understanding will provide new methodology of characterization, measurement, prediction and control, leading to reliable process and manufacture of HSCD-based products. The project will enable manufacturers to formulate their products according to rational design principles, using parameters deduced from well-characterised reproducible flow measurements. This approach will yield step changes in control and predictability over multiple length scales and multiple application sectors.