This collaboration will develop techniques to accelerate fracture mechanics simulations of both academic and industrial interest. Through research visits and the organisation of a workshop, the PI's expertise in numerical fracture and model order reduction methods will be combined with the Partner's leading research in phase-field methods to address the challenges involved. Fracture mechanics simulations play an important role in the development of materials and structural components across several industries, such as the aerospace, composites and automotive. However the use of such simulations is often limited due to the complexity of the phenomena involved, which include complex material behaviour and topological changes associated with the formation, propagation and coalescence of cracks. Recent developments in the field have resulted in new approaches, such as phase-field models, that can very effectively tackle all associated challenges, at the cost of producing very large, and therefore computationally expensive models. The project will leverage established numerical tools to develop novel methods to reduce the size of such models by exploiting i) the localised nature and ii) progressive evolution of fracture.

Functional coatings are highly engineered drug delivery systems whose structure and composition are critical to the controlled release of the active pharmaceutical ingredient in the human body. These products are at the high value end of the market and represent sophisticated solutions to difficult disease management. Manufacturing these products is challenging largely because pharmaceutical processing is complex that has traditionally been dominated by empirical understanding. The increase in manufacturing complexity coincides with the paradigm shift that the pharmaceutical industry is facing today where emphasis is now being placed on fostering a greater product and manufacturing understanding for building quality into the product and enable continuous manufacturing. Building on the recent successful demonstration of combined optical coherence tomography and terahertz real-time sensing for a coating process where an unprecedented level of in-process diagnostic information were obtained, we will now perform systematic coating process investigation to quantify and model the effects of the key process parameters. The developed data-driven models will in turn allow us to identify the optimal process conditions for validation against science-based process modelling, which can then be used to explain process observations. Ultimately, enhanced process understanding will enable the development of model-based predictive control for the full implementation of continuous manufacturing for producing next generation pharmaceutical products. This project will be supported by a world leading supplier of manufacturing equipment (Bosch, Germany), academic technology collaborators (University of Cambridge, UK and University of Liverpool, UK) and coating materials suppliers (BASF, UK and Colorcon, UK).

This project will deliver new computational modelling tools that will allow engineers working onsafety critical structures to rationally assess the effects of crack initiation and crack propagation. Suchproblems have to date remained intractable. The research will permit unprecedented understanding of crackpropagation, thereby delivering less conservative designs, and, most importantly avoid unpredictedcatastrophic failures in service. This is possible by building upon the recent success of the extended finite elementmethod (XFEM), which has emerged as a revolutionary simulation tool for modelling discontinuities and has the potential to require an order of magnitude less engineering time than conventional methods.Yet, this new method requires much reliability improvements to invade industry. By leveraging recent theoreticaland numerical developments and working hand-in-hand with future users, this project has the potential toprovide XFEM with the accuracy and robustness it requires to become the new tool of choice for structuralintegrity predictions and reconcile accuracy and computational tractability.Cracks or defects are almost always present in engineering structures. In aerospace engineering for instance, during the life of the aircraft (take offs, flights and landings), these cracks will grow under the influence of the forces applied to the structure. How do engineers ensure that, despite these growing cracks, the aircraft can still be operated safely? The idea is to regularly inspect the aircraft to monitor the major cracks. The next question is to know how often should an aircraft be inspected to prevent catastrophic failure between two inspections. To answer this question, engineers must be able to evaluate the time (number of flights) it takes for the cracks to become fatal to the structure. If it takes 1,000 flights, the maximum inspection interval should be less than 1,000. To estimate the time to failure, engineers use computer methods, where they model the behaviour of the structure using various simplifications: this is known as Damage Tolerance Analysis (DTA).However, today, existing software are still unable to provide engineers with a rational tool to assess the tolerance of a structure to damage. The proposed research has the long-term goal to provide this tool which could provide a paradigm shift in the way engineers think about simulating fracture, whereby sufficient accuracy would not be synonymous with intractable computational time or manpower.

Functional coatings are highly engineered drug delivery systems whose structure and composition is critical to the controlled release of the active pharmaceutical ingredient in the human body. This increase in manufacturing complexity coincides with a time when companies are looking to reduce costs while regulators exert pressure on the sector to ascertain a greater understanding of the products' critical quality attributes (CQAs) and associated process control. To date the development and manufacture of these high value products is challenging owning to the fact that pharmaceutical processing is complex and dominated by empirical knowledge with large gaps remaining in the full scientific understanding of the underlying processes. It is an essential need, and also a big business opportunity, to develop a step change technology-a "smart factory" capable of manufacturing these high-value products to user-defined specifications. This EPSRC call provides the consortium with the necessary funding to develop the basic components of a "smart factory" by the integration of process modeling and in-process diagnostic capability for real-time in-situ process control of advanced tablet manufacturing. By utilizing the unique diagnostic information obtained by a range of in-line sensors including our THz imaging and optical coherence tomography (OCT) sensors, we will develop theoretical models to identify key process parameters that will ultimately allow the development of an active feedback loop for advanced process control and optimisation. This EPSRC project will allow Cambridge and Liverpool University to use their combined expertise and proven technology, steered by a world leading supplier of manufacture equipment (Bosch, Liverpool, UK) and a global pharmaceutical company (Pfizer, Sandwich, UK) and supported by academia (Professor De Beer, Ghent University, Belgium), a technology SME (TeraView, Cambridge, UK) and with additional insight from the regulators (Dr Wu, FDA), to provide a highly advanced manufacturing capability currently not available to the industry.

Almost all engineering systems and many biological ones contain components that are loaded and rub against one another, such as gears and bearings in machines and hip and knee joints in humans. This rubbing results both in friction, that wastes energy, and in wear and other forms of surface damage that lead to machine (and human) downtime, and the need for expensive repair and replacement. This whole field of research is called Tribology and is pivotal both in the quest for sustainability, including reducing CO2 emissions, and in improving the quality of our lives. In Tribology the effects of rubbing, such as frictional dissipation and wear, are perceived as macroscale phenomena and are traditionally studied by macroscale experiments and analysis. However they actually originate at the atomic and molecular scale, where the severe local stresses produced by rubbing cause restructuring of surface layers, while the molecules of lubricant in rubbing contacts interact with and protect surfaces. Thus to understand and so improve tribological systems we need an approach that spans the molecular, meso- and macro-scales. This will yield both information as to the origins of friction and surface damage - and unwanted phenomena are best tackled at their roots - as well as the ability to design macro-scale components such as lubricants, bearings, gears, engines and replacement joints that operate reliably and efficiently for as long as required. To meet this need, the proposed research will develop and apply advanced techniques to model rubbing contacts at all the necessary scales - atomic/molecular simulations of surfaces and lubricants, meso-scale modelling looking at structural evolution of surfaces due to rubbing, and macro-scale simulations of actual rubbing components such as bearings and engines. These simulations will be validated by experiments that also span the same range of scales, including direct observation of molecules in rubbing contacts. The most critical and innovative stage of this project, however, will be to link all these models together in to a single computer-based package. The result will be a set of modelling programs that can be used in many different ways; for example to explore the origins of tribological phenomena; to optimise lubricant surface and materials design; to predict performance of machines based on a combination of design and underlying atomic/molecular processes. Such an approach will give us tools both to understand in full tribological phenomena such as friction and wear and to enable effective "virtual testing", where new and novel designs, lubricants and surfaces can be combined and their effectiveness tested prior to recourse to time-consuming and expensive experimental development.