This is network proposal that gathers all the national expertise in rotary wing systems: The Vertical Lift Network (VLN). The network addresses technical problems for a special class of vehicles powered by direct lift: conventional helicopters, compound helicopters, tilt-rotors, fan-in-wing vehicles, unmanned air vehicles powered by rotors. It is recognised that no single academic institution has expertise and test facilities to take on these new challenges. Several initiatives in Europe (CleanSky, Horizon 2020, national research programmes in Germany, France, Italy, The Netherlands), the USA (NASA, Boeing, Sikorsky), Russia (TSAGI, MAI, KAI) and possibly also China (CARDC) could undermine the competiveness of the UK. Countries such as Japan (JAXA), Korea (KARI) are also gaining momentum. The proposal brings together expertise across the full spectrum of aerospace engineering, including aerodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, wind tunnel testing, aeroelasticity, aeroacoustics, materials, control systems, power systems, flight dynamics, handling qualities, and systems engineering. Due to this multi-disciplinarity, leading-edge research initiatives can only be addressed by pooling resources together to create critical mass. No single organisation has the know-how to address the upcoming technology challenges. The academic network is to work closely with the industry and government stakeholders to identify the strategic directions of research in the next decade. Other key objectives include the promotion of scientific collaboration, the identification of the funding sources, training of students and scientific dissemination via an annual workshop.

"Turbulence is the most important unsolved problem of classical physics" (Richard Feynman) due to its high non-linearity and chaotic behaviour. Therefore, it has been widely accepted that turbulence is not repeatable even with identical initial and boundary conditions (i.e. the butterfly effects). Recently, however, a Russian research group led by Prof Kachanov (Visiting Researcher of this proposal) observed a certain set of repeatable flows in a very late stage of laminar-to-turbulent transition, which can be considered as turbulence as far as its statistics are concerned. These are called deterministic turbulence. Unlike "ordinary" turbulence, the deterministic turbulence allows us to predict the exact time and location of turbulence events that take place in the flow. One can also go back the flow history to see the cause of turbulence events. This provides an exciting opportunity for turbulence research that has not been possible before. Here we propose to utilise the deterministic turbulence to better understand the turbulent boundary-layer structures with a view to develop an innovative strategy for turbulence control and optimise existing flow control techniques.

Electrification of aviation will be central to achieve ambitious environmental targets for the reduction of carbon emission, fuel burn and noise. The UK Aviation Strategy 2050 sets out objectives to ensure a safe and secure way to travel, support growth while tackling environmental impacts. A current game-changing concept is hydrogen-powered electric aircraft. Airbus ZEROe concept aircraft enables investigation of hydrogen technologies that will shape the future zero-emission aircraft. Large-scale hydrogen-powered electric aircraft of multi-megawatt level have very high requirements on power density and efficiency of the on-board electric network. Liquid hydrogen offers a cryogenic environment for the electric network, which opens new opportunities for the use of superconductivity. A cryogenic and superconducting direct current (DC) distribution network is a key step for the development of large-scale hydrogen-powered electric aircraft due to its high efficiency, high-power density, and reduced impact on the overall weight of the aircraft. The Fellowship aims to make an important contribution towards the development of large-scale hydrogen-powered electric aircraft by developing the first reliable high-power density and high efficiency cryogenic and superconducting DC distribution network. A cryogenic and superconducting direct current (DC) distribution network is attractive due to its high-power density, high efficiency, and reduced impact on the overall weight of the aircraft. This Fellowship will address the highly demanding safety and reliability requirements of the superconducting DC distribution network, necessary to ensure the supply to flight critical loads and to enable the safe recovery of the supply from any fault conditions. It will do so through a novel, powerful combination of numerical and experimental methods to deliver the first cryogenic hybrid DC circuit breaker combined with a superconducting fault current limiter (SFCL). By collaborating with Airbus, ATI FlyZero, IXYS UK Westcode Ltd., and University of Manchester, a pioneering method for the control and protection of the superconducting DC distribution network for large-scale hydrogen-powered electric aircraft will be demonstrated as a vital pathway to make the technology viable for future commercial zero emissions and low noise electric aircraft.

Today's products from many manufacturing industries, notably aerospace, automotive and high-tech manufacturing, depend on embedded software to function. Since many of these products support safety or mission-critical services, the correctness of the embedded software is a paramount concern. Most of today's industrial efforts focus on improving the code review, testing and qualification process to achieve this. Whilst these processes can reveal defects, they cannot prove their absence. Further, finding defects at review, test or even integration time is too late. Significant engineering efforts have already occurred, making further changes complicated, costly, and uncertain. In contrast to testing approaches, formal verification can prove the correctness of software, substantially reducing the need for testing, whilst also increasing reliability. Formal verification has been investigated for three decades, but has matured significantly over the last few years. The proposers believe it is now possible to develop a verification framework that can verify Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) notations such as UML and SysML, which are widely used to develop embedded software. The proposers have previously mapped MDE descriptions in a custom notation into both source code and the process algebra CSP, allowing formal verification using FDR, a model checker also produced by the proposers. This led to verified embedded systems that contained 1M lines of code. This work was limited in the modelling languages, the system architectures, and execution semantics it supported and had no formal proof guaranteeing the source code generated was equivalent to the models being verified. It was also a point solution that could not interoperate with other tools, nor handle legacy code. The overall goal of this proposal is to produce an industrially-applicable framework that supports verification and implementation of MDE languages. We will also develop a proof-of-concept tool that supports our framework and allows both academic and industrial exploitation. At the core of our framework will be a new formal verification language, called Communicating Components (CoCo), that is designed to model embedded software written in MDE languages. FDR will be used to verify models expressed in CoCo; the recent step-change performance improvements in FDR3 mean we will be able to handle more complex components and architectures. We will also provide a translation from CoCo into source code. We will improve the reliability of the source code translator by using the Coq theorem prover to prove the translation preserves the semantics of the model. In addition to the MDE engineers who will benefit from this project, formal methods researchers will also benefit. We will develop new specification-directed abstraction and verification techniques, based on the compositional methods we used in our earlier verification work. Secondly, we will add extra functionality to FDR3 to support this work, and thereby make our work readily accessible to the large FDR3 community. We have assembled an enthusiastic group of industrial partners comprising Aerospace Technology Institute (leader of UK strategy for aerospace), ASML (world's largest supplier of photolithography systems), ASTC (global industry leader for tools and solutions in safety critical and real time control electronics industries), MBDA (world leader in missiles and missile systems) and Rolls-Royce CDS (leading provider of high integrity control systems), who will collaborate with us and provide essential industrial expertise across these industries. This will allow us to ensure that the framework and proof-of-concept tool we produce are industrially applicable. Our partners will also provide case studies and, we hope, ultimately provide users for our technology.

We are witnessing huge global shifts towards cleaner growth and more resource efficient economies. The drive to lower carbon emissions is resulting in dramatic changes in how we travel and the ways we generate and use energy worldwide. Electrical machines are at the heart of the accelerating trends in the electrification of transport and the increased use of renewable energy such as offshore wind. To address the pressing drivers for clean growth and meet the increasing demands of new applications, new electrical machines with improved performance - higher power density, lower weight, improved reliability - are being designed by researchers and industry. However, there are significant manufacturing challenges to be overcome if UK industry is going to be able to manufacture these new machines with the appropriate cost, flexibility and quality. The Hub's vision is to put UK manufacturing at the forefront of the electrification revolution. The Hub will address key manufacturing challenges in the production of high integrity and high value electrical machines for the aerospace, energy, high value automotive and premium consumer sectors. The Hub will work in partnership with industry to address some common and fundamental barriers limiting manufacturing capability and capacity: the need for in-process support to manual operations in electrical machine manufacture - e.g. coil winding, insertions, electrical connections and wiring - to improve productivity and provide quality assurance; the sensitivity of high value and high integrity machines to small changes in tolerance and the requirement for high precision in manufacturing for safety critical applications; the increasing drive to low batch size, flexibility and customisation; and the need to train the next generation of manufacturing scientists and engineers. The Hub's research programme will explore new and emerging manufacturing processes, new materials for enhanced functionality and/or light-weighting, new approaches for process modelling and simulation, and the application of digital approaches with new sensors and Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.