Public Funding for Ramboll UK Limited

**BETTER GREENER FASTER FACADES** The Prime Minister in his speech of 30 June 2020 outlined the UK Government strategy to support a post COVID-19 recovery to "build, build, build". This project supports that strategy through 'Better, Greener, Faster Facades' aimed primarily at the Education sector and supporting the schools building programme. In particular, this will enable much more productive and thermally efficient, sustainable components for the external walls of a school - which accounts for approximately 20% of the build cost - to be delivered to the project fully completed, and reducing the onsite workforce that currently needs to work in close proximity. The project will design, deliver and test a working prototype by June 2021 with a target of incorporating into the next wave of school building projects thereafter. The product and system will also have a wider application into other building sectors, include healthcare. **Outputs** The project outputs will include: •Designed and tested Better, Greener, Faster Facade prototype •A digitally configurable tool to enable the rapid design into new schools projects •Evidence and sustainability analysis supporting the Better, Greener, Faster credentials of the system **Team** The project team (SME denoted\*) is: •Laing O'Rourke (lead) -- a leading construction, engineering and manufacturing enterprise •Ramboll -- a leading design and engineering consultancy company with a deep understanding of the education sector and façade technology •Etude\* -- a sustainability consultant with focus on the built environment

Highways England aspires to operate an intelligent, self-maintaining network of assets with a positive environmental footprint. How will automated systems deploy the right resources, to the right location at the right time? How will environmental value be quantified, improvement areas identified, prioritised and monitored? Understanding location and context is the foundation of intelligent operations. The overall vision for this project is to revolutionise how Highways England manages its environmental estate by automatically calculating network wide environmental metrics and remotely monitoring assets. Phase 1 of this project demonstrated the feasibility of automatically interpreting satellite imagery and vehicle-collected imagery data to create input data for such intelligent applications. This brought together Ramboll technical expertise, our deep understanding of Highways England's environmental obligations, and key stakeholders from Highways England. Outcomes from phase 1 included the identification of several related but distinct applications that are of significant value to Highways England. These applications relate to: 1.Habitat identification and classification including habitat connectivity; 2.Invasive species; and 3.Object detection including assets such as noise barriers. The work proposed in Phase 2 will further refine and develop the approaches tested in Phase 1 and produce a prototype in anticipation of commercialising the product. The work in Phase 2 falls into the following categories: 1.Automating the data pipeline used for habitat classification from satellite imagery; 2.Extend the geographic footprint of the training dataset; 3.Tune the machine learning algorithms to improve accuracy and generalizability; 4.Prototype development, including applications serving results from various machine learning tasks; and 5.Business model development and commercialisation / exploitation.

Highways England aspires to operate an intelligent, self-maintaining network of assets with a positive environmental footprint. How will automated systems deploy the right resources, to the right location at the right time? How will environmental value be quantified, improvement areas identified, prioritised and monitored? Understanding location and context is the foundation of intelligent operations. This project will test the feasibility of developing automated processes that can identify assets and understand the surrounding environment using multi-scale aerial and satellite imagery. There is a plethora of imagery products available and new services will allow Highways England to visualise environmental parameters in more detail, more often and more cost effectively. The proposed project will review current and future imagery products, evaluating their suitability for use in Highways England specific applications. This will identify potential environmental parameters and their available spatial (e.g. local or network wide) and temporal resolution. Using available imagery sources the project will develop machine learning algorithms, trained using the known locations of Highways England assets and environmental datasets. The project will build on Ramboll’s SiteSee platform which can analyse large volumes of remotely sensed data. It can identify and quantify ground cover type, vegetation classes, and infer aspects such as growth rates. The accuracy of the results will be verified using driven imagery and in-situ checks. The technical requirements of scaling the process across the entire network will also be evaluated. Using Ramboll domain knowledge and a deep understanding of Highways England's environmental obligations, the feasibility of using the results in a range of automated environmental applications will be tested. Applications include intelligent maintenance (e.g. condition of drainage infrastructure, monitoring invasive species treatment) and producing a regularly updated, consistent environmental baseline for improving biodiversity. In addition to applications providing a live view, the potential for evaluating future scenarios will be considered. One suggested priority is to automate the process of identifying areas where different types of planting achieve better environmental outcomes. Example metrics include noise, natural capital, carbon offset and biodiversity net gain. Automating these metrics would enable further innovation and revolutionise how Highways England manages its environmental estate.

The Soho Food Waste Energy venture aims to divert the waste generated by restaurants in the area from landfill into a locally based CHP plant capable of generating heat and reduced price electricity for social housing and small businesses in Soho. The project team is looking to procure a "closed loop" food waste management solution that will be anaerobically digesting the organic residues of the neighbourhood and turning them into biogas to fuel the CHP generator that will be supplying heat and power to the community. The above constitutes an innovative approach to establishing efficient, de-centralised heat and power stations that are truly sustainable. Sucessful delivery of the proposal will comprise a number of benefits in the environmental , commercial and social aspect: waste volume reduction, reduced CO2 emissions, improved air quality, affordable heat and power for locals, district energy and electric vehicle charging network enhancement, tackling fuel poverty, greater energy security and stimulation of the economic growth in the area.

We plan to develop and integrate three complementary novel technologies and demonstrate their application to noise and vibration cancellation. They are: a novel highly responsive, audio bandwidth combined sensor/actuator and associated "local echo canceller" for both sensing the noise and simultaneously cancelling it; novel moulded composite panels with tailorable characteristics for passive noise damping; advanced digital adaptive control algorithms. The resulting "smart panels" have potential for further added-value functionality upgrades. We will build on a previous TSB-funded project which developed the component technologies to proof-of-principle. We will reduce the size, weight and cost of our sensor/actuator and integrate it into panels; demonstrate operation of our local echo canceller; develop and demonstrate a novel real-time adaptive digital control loop; develop the panels to maximise both passive and active noise damping and to facilitate panel jointing; and demonstrate end-user applications. The growing business opportunity for "smart panels" is driven by two factors: increased awareness of the adverse effects of noise on health (reflected by increasingly stringent legislation and government policy) and the growing desire for a quieter living, working and travelling environment. Applications include buildings, cars (especially the growing number of small luxury vehicles) buses, trains, trams, boats and aircraft. In addition to product sales, IP licensing, design consultancy and firmware / functionality upgrades offer ongoing high-value revenue potential.

The public description for this project has been requested but has not yet been received.