Intrastructure - Supporting the Future

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Engineering and Physical SciencesResearch Council

INFRASTRUCTURE SUPPORTING THE FUTURE

INFRASTRUCTURE SUPPORTING THE FUTURE

EPSRC supports research for a reliable, safe and resilient infrastructure supplying water, energy, communications, transport systems and waste systems essential to society. This is crucial in facing the demands of changing environmental, demographic and economic conditions and requires innovative solutions to be developed in order to ensure a healthy, productive and sustainable society that is able to support economic growth.

Our support for infrastructure totals 350 research projects worth more than £350 million across the engineering and physical sciences, from fundamental research to applied activities in collaboration with stakeholders from utility companies, large and small businesses, local authorities, town planners, policy makers and charities.

Infrastructure is a broad topic and is relevant to other sectors including Healthcare, Renewable and Clean Energy, and the Digital Economy. Relevant research is included here, but further information on our wider support for these sectors is available in separate statements (see back cover for those available. “Healthcare” is in preparation). The relationship is shown in the chart.

EPSRC also supports research relevant to the built environment (including structural engineering) with an investment of £100 million in 150 projects. The topic is not described here, however, as it is excluded from Government infrastructure reports.

Key drivers

The UK faces challenges in its economic aspirations. As noted in the Treasury 2010 report Strategy for National Infrastructure1

a healthy infrastructure is key to delivering the growth and competitiveness of our economy as well as our quality of life.

In 2010 the World Economic Forum ranked the UK 33rd for the quality of its infrastructure and its competitiveness was 12th, down from 5th in 2005.

The Council for Science and Technology2 highlighted the need for more a more coherent approach to infrastructure provision, and the requirement for a more resilient infrastructure. It also recognised the need for infrastructure operators to connect better with the science base, and the need for skilled people able to work with future infrastructure.

The UK government is responding to these challenges. It recognises that the quality of infrastructure is a key component in the achievement of economic growth and prosperity.

As noted by the Treasury 2010 report Strategy for National Infrastructure a healthy infrastructure is key to delivering the growth and competitiveness of our economy as well as our quality of life. EPSRC plays an important role in supporting the vital research that underpins this development.

The UK Government Strategy for National Infrastructure and consequent National Infrastructure Plan identify key challenges around improving the nation’s infrastructure, including the obsolescence and ageing of existing infrastructure, strong competition from overseas investment, increased levels of demand on the existing infrastructure networks, resilience to climate change and the interdependence between infrastructure systems.

£350 millioninvested in infrastructure research

350 research projects

694 collaborating organisations

1800postgraduate students training in infrastructure related areas

Infrastructure topics (outer circle) and their relevance to other sectors (centre). Total investment £350 million

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EPSRC investment supports these goals and has led to innovation in infrastructure, in policy, industry, and the provision of evidence and recommendations that reduce the risks for private and public investment.

Research for our future

Our infrastructure portfolio is broad, encompassing a wide variety of topics from energy to construction, from water and waste to transport (see chart). Researchers are looking at ways that allow a greater understanding of the interdependencies between infrastructure networks. There is also work on land management that is informing policy makers on how best to plan our cities and towns as well as socio-technical research that help us to understand user behaviour related to these new technologies.

For example Ashford’s Integrated Alternatives is a £500k project involving the Universities of Exeter, Surrey, Cranfield, Bradford and Imperial College. It is exploring the feasibility of a more integrated urban utility service provision as a way to improve the sustainability of urban development. The consortium is addressing technology options, the role of stakeholders in decision making, and new business models. They have been tackling the issues of scale, integration and delivery in an attempt to reduce resource use, limit emissions, manage innovation and improve the quality of life in a case study set in Ashford, Kent.

Another project, Mapping the Underworld, seeks to make the business of maintaining buried infrastructure more efficient. Each year up to 4 million holes are cut into the UK road network in order to install or repair buried pipes and cables at a direct cost of £1.5 billion and a further £5.5 billion in social costs. Failure to identify accurately the location of existing buried assets results in numerous problems for utility owners, contractors and road users and increased traffic congestion. The consortium of Universities, construction and utilities companies, local authorities and others, led by the University of Birmingham, is developing the means to locate, map in 3-D and record, the position of all buried utility assets without excavation through the creation of a multi-sensor device for the location of underground utilities. The prototype will combine novel ground penetrating radar, acoustics and low frequency active and passive electromagnetic fields.

Creating new partnerships

It is crucial to the success and take up of research that it meets user needs. Some 694 organisations have been involved in the infrastructure-related research we support. They include utility companies, large and small businesses, local authorities, town planners, policy makers and charities. between them they contribute around £105 million in cash as well as in-kind contributions such as knowledge of real-world problems. See Case Studies and Box for examples.

Skills for the future

EPSRC supports 9500 postgraduate students. Of those some 20% are in areas directly relevant to infrastructure. This includes a number of Doctoral Training Centres, where students spend a significant proportion of their time working with industrial collaborators. Centres cover sectors including water, construction, transport, low carbon and sustainability.

Priorities for the future

Evolution - Understanding how our infrastructure needs will evolve over the next 20-100 years: how user behaviour will change, and how innovations

and technologies related to infrastructure will be accepted.

Integration - Understanding the interdependencies and interconnections between different forms of infrastructure and in particular how the failure of one system can impact on others.

Sustainability - Developing innovative solutions for infrastructure which are sustainable – using less environmental and economic resources and are low carbon and affordable.

Resilience - Ensuring our infrastructure is resilient to climate change, terrorist attacks, the changing demographics from population increases and changes in user behaviour.

1 HM Treasury (2010) Strategy for National

Infrastructure

2 Council for Science and Technology (2009) A National Infrastructure for the 21st Century.

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH PROGRAMMES IN SUSTAINABLE AND RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE

Sustainable Urban Environments

- A £45M initiative investigating different ways of improving sustainability in the urban environment whilst also improving the quality of life in the UK

- 30 consortia working in collaboration with partners from local authorities, large and small companies, town planners and charities

- Collaborators include The Carbon Trust, Wates Construction, Yorkshire Water, Environment Agency, CIRIA, RSPB, Transport for London

Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change

- A £20M network of 19 projects looking at the impacts of climate change and possible adaptation options in the built environment and its infrastructure including water resources, transport systems, telecommunications, energy and waste

- Includes the large ‘Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium’ – a £4.7M activity to deliver model and decision support tools to enable analysis of a robust national infrastructure system

- Collaborators include DEFRA, Cabinet Office, E.On, BP, Halcrow, Costain, Mott MacDonald, Willis, Ordnance Survey and the Local Government Association.

“Infrastructure forms the economic backbone of the UK. It is the fabric that defines us as a modern industrialised nation. The standard and resilience of infrastructure in the UK has a direct relationship to the growth and competitiveness of our economy, our quality of life and our ability to meet our climate change objectives and commitments.” HM Treasury (2010) Strategy for National Infrastructure”1

CASE STUDY 01 PREDICTING AND MANAGING FLOOD RISK EPSRC has invested £7 million into the Flood Risk Management Research Consortium coordinated by Heriot-Watt University. Established in 2004 it focuses on strategic research investigating the prediction and management of flood risk and developing sustainable flood management strategies. The project is delivering tools and techniques to support more accurate flood forecasting and warning, improvements to flood management infrastructure and reduction of flood risk to people, property and the environment including research in the area of land use management in the context of the generation of floods during extreme rainfall.

The partners with Heriot –Watt in the project are Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Meteorological Office, Halcrow, CIRIA ,HR Wallingford, the Environment Agency, the Northern Ireland Rivers Agency, the United Kingdom Water Industry Research Organisation, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Assembly Government, DEFRA and the Office of Public Works in the Republic of Ireland.

CASE STUDY 02THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORT SYSTEMSThe future resilience of the UK transport network depends on technology and infrastructure changes, climate and extreme weather events. The Future Resilient Transport Networks (FUTURENET) is a four year research project, jointly funded by EPSRC and the Economic and Social Research Council. It aims to provide a vision and the tools to assess and plan for transport systems in the future.

The team is exploring the nature of the UK transport system in 2050 both in terms of its physical characteristics and its usage, and the shape of the transport network in 2050 that will be most resilient to climate change. This includes developing transport demand scenarios, case study infrastructure asset inventories and models of weather or climate induced failure mechanisms that might affect transport systems.

The work will help the decision making of government (local and national), transport planners, transport managers and professional engineers to improve their decision making with regard to anticipated changes in climate, technology, social behaviour and economies.

FUTURENET is led by the University of Birmingham with partners from Loughborough and Nottingham Universities, HR Wallingford, the British Geological Survey, and TRL Limited as well as stakeholder groups including Network Rail, Highways Agency, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and WSP.

CASE STUDY 03 TRAINING THE FUTURE WORKFORCE IN URBAN SUSTAINABILITY AND RESILIENCEThe £6 million University College London Doctoral Training Centre in Urban Sustainability and Resilience provides opportunities to carry out research in collaboration with industry to help solve innovatively some of the most pressing problems of our time. The Centre already hosts a wide range of interdisciplinary research projects from green city master planning to water network resilience. These four year projects are designed and carried out in collaboration with key industry players in the field including Arup, AECOM, Atkins, and Logica. The programme offers a unique blend of academic rigour and a strong commercial exposure so that graduating research engineers are able to face problems in urban sustainability and resilience with expert yet fresh and innovative eyes. As Geoff Darch from Atkins puts it “The collaboration between the Centre for Urban Sustainability and Resilience and Atkins on the project Enhancing Resilience of Urban Water Infrastructure to Reduce Risks creates a thinking space to foster new techniques and tools that will be robust and of value to us and more importantly our clients.”

CASE STUDY 04 SMART INFRASTRUCTURESEPSRC and the Technology Strategy Board, have invested £10 million in an Innovation and Knowledge Centre on Smart Infrastructure and Construction at the University of Cambridge. This is a dedicated research facility for developing and commercialising innovative sensor technologies for use in the construction and infrastructure industry. A further £7 million will be provided from industrial partners including Laing O’Rourke, Mott Macdonald, Skanska Construction, Costain, Capita Symonds, Highways Agency, Arup, Thames Water, Atkins, IBM, Thales, Transport for London, London Underground and Tube Lines and Toshiba Research Europe. Professor Robert Mair (University of Cambridge) who is leading the research comments that “The centre will focus on smarter construction and production processes, decision support, manufacturing strategy and reconfigurable building blocks. The aim is to transform the industry through a whole-life approach to achieving sustainability in construction and infrastructure, covering design and commissioning, the construction process, exploitation and use, and eventual decommissioning.”

EPSRC is the main UK government agency for funding high-quality basic, strategic and applied research and related postgraduate training in engineering and the physical sciences, to help the nation exploit the next generation of technological change. It invests more than £850 million a year in a broad range of subjects – from mathematics to materials science, and from information technology to structural engineering.

www.epsrc.ac.uk

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PIONEERING A LOW CARBON FUTUREThe Research Councils UK Energy Programme

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PIONEERING A DIGITAL FUTUREResearch Councils UK Digital Economy Programme

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caSe Study 04CeMeNt set to reDuCe CArBoN eMissioNsEPSRC funding has played a key role in developing both a new, carbon-negative cement and its manufacturing process. The development is spearheaded by Novacem, a spin-out company from Imperial College London and is also supported by the Technology Strategy Board and the London Development Agency.

Global production of cement is set to double to over fi ve billion tonnes/year by 2050. But the type most commonly used today has a heavy environmental price accounting for fi ve percent of manmade CO2 emissions. Novacem’s cement is carbon-negative absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere during manufacture. This is because it isn’t limestone based, requires low process temperatures and contains carbon-negative additives. The company has received additional venture funding through the Royal Society Enterprise Fund and is seeking further commercial sponsorship to take the process through to manufacture.

caSe Study 03tuNABLe stArCh for GreeN CheMistrY10 years ago PhD research in the University of York’s Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence led to the discovery of new high surface area forms of starch. These are useful in applications from chromatography to catalysis. These new materials have remarkable properties which can be ‘tuned’ from starch-like to carbon-like. Named “Starbons” (registered trade name), they are the subject of several patent applications and are sold commercially for laboratory use worldwide. Continued EPSRC support is allowing their use in a number of processes including effl uent treatment in the pharmaceutical industry as well as studies on process optimisation, scale-up trials and further applications with the chemical industry. Brian Trenbirth, Technical Director of Contract Chemicals a user of the Starbon technology says that they “will be delighted to transfer Starbon technology from laboratory through pilot to full scale production. This innovative technology will enable us to diversify our business portfolio thus helping the company to expand”.

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EPSRC is the main UK government agency for funding high-quality basic, strategic and applied research and related postgraduate training in engineering and the physical sciences, to help the nation exploit the next generation of technological change. It invests more than £800 million a year in a broad range of subjects – from mathematics to materials science, and from information technology to structural engineering.www.epsrc.ac.uk

TECHNOLOGY FOR A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY

engineering and Physical Sciencesresearch council

August 2010

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PIONEERING SKILLS TO BUILD BRITAIN’S FUTURE

Engineering and Physical SciencesResearch Council

SKILLS