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.

The metals industry is a vital part of the UK economy directly contributing >£10bn to the UK GDP and employing thousands of people. In particular, as the only metal produced and consumed in volume in the UK, steel is a foundation industry underpinning the UK economy. The microstructure of a steel dictates its functional and structural properties, with thermal processing being a critical factor governing the microstructure. Therefore, the ability to measure changes in microstructure at high temperature is critical to researchers in this area and important concern for steel manufacturers and component producers. Our previous collaborative work led to commercial sensors such as EMspecTM, which is used to monitor transformation in the hot strip mill, where the strip above the sensor is at temperatures up to 800 degree C, but the sensor is kept at room temperature in a water cooled jacket. In this proposal, we will make the next big step: to realise a new suite of electromagnetic instrumentation for measuring the properties of metal samples and products dynamically during thermal processing, with THE SENSORS THEMSELVES operating in the high temperature environment. This will create a suite of lab tools fitting inside furnaces that have not been available before for characterising steel at high temperatures, complementary to current dilatometry and calorimetry, which measure volumetric and thermic changes. Some important microstructural changes such as those associated with small enthalpy and/or length changes (e.g. recovery and recrystallisation events, tempering of martensitic steels) could potentially be resolved where DSC and DSD are hard to resolve. Furthermore, the instrument can potentially become a new routinely used tool in full scale metal production, e.g., on continuous annealing production lines (CAPL) or batch annealing furnaces to enhance product quality control and energy efficient operation of these processes.

Steel continues to be the most used material in the world by value and play an essential role in all aspects of society, from construction to transport, energy generation to food production. The long-term sustainability of UK steel making requires lower energy production and the development of high value steel products. The ability to measure the microstructure of steel in a non-contact, non-destructive fashion can lead to dramatic improvement in the understanding of the material and its behaviour during processing and in-service. Improved control during processing will increase efficiency in production of complex steel microstructures and allow new generation alloys to be made. Through our previous EPSRC and industry funded research we have created a new electromagnetic (EM) measurement system, EMspecTM, that can monitor the microstructure of strip steel during hot processing. This system is now providing information related to the condition (transformed phase fraction) of the microstructure over 100% of the strip length. The scene is now set to make the next major step forward with the information that new in-line microstructure measurement systems can offer - proposed real-time in-line microstructural engineering, or 'RIME' technology. Our ambition is to enable real-time microstructure engineering during processing via dynamic control of cooling strategies or heat treatment using EM sensor feedback, in particular to engineer microstructures that were previously either impossible to achieve in full scale production or could not be reliably achieved. This will require detailed knowledge of the full temperature - magnetic - microstructure parameter space and sensors that are capable of operating in elevated temperature environments (such as heat treatment facilities), which are not currently available outside the laboratory. In addition application to a wide range of product lines, from strip to plate or sections requires integration of through thickness cooling models and EM signal-depth interpretation all mapped for varying temperature and phase fraction. In this project we will develop new sensors that can operate at high temperature; both laboratory systems to determine full magnetic properties with temperature for model and commercial steels, essential information that is currently unavailable in the literature, and robust deployable sensors for trials in industrial conditions; and systems designed to interrogate for through thickness data. We will develop a demonstration facility, consisting of a furnace, run out table with cooling sprays and EMspecTM system, to allow dynamic feedback control of cooling schedules from EM sensor signals to engineer specific microstructures. Alongside the hardware and demonstration activities we will also develop modelling capabilities, both for sensor design and signal interpretation: our current models are used to relate sensor signals to microstructure (phase fraction and grain size at room temperature) with incorporation of temperature effects planned in this project. A number of case studies have been identified to trial the new technologies including advanced high strength strip steels (AHSS) for light-weighting of vehicles, high strength - high toughness pipeline steels for demanding environments, high strength, more uniform, constructional steels and tailoring microstructure in rod.

Natural resources are the foundation of our life on Earth, without which neither our economy nor society can function. However, due to continued resource overconsumption and the rapidly increasing world population, the global demand for natural resources and the related intense pressure on our environment have reached an unprecedented and unsustainable level. A shocking fact is that our cumulative consumption of natural resources over the last 60 years is greater than that over the whole of previous human history. With an anticipated world population of 9.3bn in 2050, the predicted global natural resource consumption will be almost tripled. This level of overconsumption is obviously not sustainable, and there is a compelling need for us to use our advanced science and technology to work with, rather than to exploit, nature. Metallic materials are the backbone of manufacturing and the fuel for economic growth. However, metal extraction and refining is extremely energy intensive and causes a huge negative impact on our environment. The world currently produces 50MT of Al and 2bnT of steel each year, accounting for 7-8% of the world's total energy consumption and 8% of the total global CO2 emission. Clearly, we cannot continue this increasing and dissipative use of our limited natural resources. However, the good news is that metals are in principle infinitely recyclable and that their recycling requires only a small fraction of the energy required for primary metal production. Between 1908 and 2007 we produced 833MT of aluminium, 506MT of copper and 33bnT of steels. It is estimated that more than 50% of this metal still exists as accessible stock in our society. Such metal stock will become our energy "bank" and a rich resource for meeting our future needs. The UK metal casting industry adds £2.6bn/yr to the UK economy, employs 30,000 people, produces 1.14bnT of metal castings per year and underpins the competitive position of every sector of UK manufacturing. However, the industry faces severe challenges, including "hollowing-out" over the past 30 years, increasing energy and materials costs, tightening environmental regulations and a short supply of skilled people. We are now establishing the Future Liquid Metal Engineering Hub to address these challenges. The core Hub activities will be based at Brunel strongly supported by the complementary expertise of our academic spokes at Oxford, Leeds, Manchester and Imperial College and with over £40M investment from our industrial partners. The Hub's long-term vision is full metal circulation, in which the global demand for metallic materials is met by a full circulation of secondary metals (with only limited addition of primary metals each year) through reduced usage, reuse, remanufacture, closed-loop recycling and effective recovery and refining of secondary metals. This represents a paradigm shift for metallurgical science, manufacturing technology and the industrial landscape. The Hub aims to lay down a solid foundation for full metal circulation, demonstrated initially with light metals and then extended to other metals in the longer term. We have identified closed-loop recycling of metallic materials as the greatest challenge and opportunity facing global manufacturing industry, and from this we have co-created with our industrial partners the Hub's research programme. We will conduct fundamental research to deliver a nucleation centred solidification science to underpin closed-loop recycling; we will carry out applied research to develop recycling-friendly high performance metallic materials and sustainable metal processing technologies to enable closed-loop recycling; we will operate a comprehensive outreach programme to engage potential stakeholders to ensure the widest possible impact of our research; we will embed a centre for doctoral training in liquid metal engineering to train future leaders to deliver long-lasting benefits of closed-loop recycling.

Resource Efficiency is essential for reducing the environmental impact of manufacturing. Progress in achieving it has been slow, but a rapidly changing international context, including Brexit, is giving new emphasis to Industrial Strategy in the UK which creates a unique window of opportunity. This transformational Programme aims to locate resource efficiency at the heart of a visionary industrial strategy; it will create new world-leading competitive advantage for UK manufacturing by addressing four fundamental barriers to progress: - to break out of lock-in to resource inefficiency, novel methods and tools will be developed to enumerate and characterise all today's options to design and manufacture material goods; - to create clarity about the environmental impact of new manufacturing strategies, a ground-breaking Physical Resources Observatory will be developed to access and interpret more and better global resource data; - to target manufacturing innovations for Resource Efficiency and accelerate their implementation, the features of an effective Innovation Pipeline will be characterised, tested and deployed with a portfolio of promising emerging manufacturing technologies; - to give new priority to Resource Efficiency in Industrial Strategy, new metrics and decision-framing will be developed and tested in the Living Lab of the Programme's industrial consortium. The Programme brings together nine internationally-leading academic groups and a consortium of subscribing industrial partners. The management strategy, designed for flexibility, aims to integrate existing methods from diverse disciplines to address the application of Resource Efficiency while stimulating exploration of new methodological opportunities where existing approaches are inadequate. The value of the investment in the Programme will be maximised through an International Advisory Panel to support connections and awareness, a consortium executive committee to determine priorities for strategic analysis, and a supervisory board to ensure financial and legal compliance. The programme will deliver impact via quarterly strategic analysis reports on resource issues, a programme of policy influence led by an experienced Policy Champion, technological innovations, an annual UK Forum on Resource Efficiency, commercial and open-access software tools, researcher training and multi-channel communications.