The Foundation Industries (FIs) metals, glass, ceramics, cement, chemicals, and paper are vital to the UK manufacturing and construction sectors. Approximately 75% of the materials we see around us have been made by one of these six industries and moving towards 2050, we need to rapidly address the challenges brought about by climate change, and the need for long-term sustainability of these industries in the UK. Innovation is key to achieving this aim. The UK FIs are less innovative than in other competitive countries; over a third of businesses have not introduced new innovation in the last three years; smaller businesses are less likely to be innovative than larger companies; and there is hesitancy around innovation adoption. To support the UK in its journey to become a Science and Technology Superpower by 2030, the Foundation Industries Ventures (FIVe) Science and Innovation Network (S&IN) will unite innovators, startups, industry, investors, and universities from across the FIs to tackle the individual and cross-cutting regulatory barriers. The network will accelerate innovation pathways by developing regulatory science that supports decision making for Deeptech innovation and scaleup, for technology readiness level 1-9\. FIVe SN&I will focus on Collaboration, Education, and Communication to: * Build a network of relevant stakeholders, by working with established groups (FISC, TFINetwork+, and TransFIRe) thereby delivering regulatory science to accelerate innovation pathways. * Discover the necessary training required to up-skill the innovation value chain and deliver that required training while continuing to develop a firm foothold as a trusted delivery partner. * Communicate the findings of its research with the wider community through the existing FIve platform and become the go-to, trusted network to influence policy through innovator-informed evidence. Discover Phase deliverables: * Sandpits and online workshops for data discovery. * Reports and Thought Pieces to disseminate findings to a wide audience. * A tactical review of the regulatory landscape, conducted by ANION. * The proposal for the FIVe S&IN Implementation Phase. In the Implementation Phase, the FIVe S&IN will become the go-to, trusted partner to support the acceleration of innovation across the FIs in the UK and to influence the UK government and future regulation. It will deliver cross-cutting solutions and influence policy through innovator-informed evidence, and act as the "intelligence front door" for FI innovators to navigate the complex regulatory landscape. This enhances business capacity to exploit commercial opportunities and enables the UK to become the most innovative economy in the world.

COREu will demonstrate key enabling technologies in a CCS value chain and support the development of three new CCS routes in Central-East Europe (CEE), helping accelerate CCS development . COREu will (a) provide the means for development of an open-access, trans-national network (infrastructure and logistic) to connect emitters with storage sites in Europe, by identifying multimodal transport requirements, and developing emitters’ clusters to create the demand and the investment rationale, (b) increase the knowledge of the CCS value chain across Europe through interconnected initiatives, sharing of experience, knowledge and data to create a common framework that encompasses all key aspects of CCS deployment: technological know-how, business models, consensus management, monitoring, reporting and validation, policy framework, transport and storage safety. COREU will contribute to 6.8Mt/year in CO2 reduction by 2035 and 36Mt/year by 2050, develop 8 innovations for Measurement Monitoring Verification, interoperability and Value Chain Monitoring, and improve the Internal Rate of Return of CO2 infrastructure investment by 6% through de-risking core technologies.

This collaborative project will develop, build and operate an industry scale demonstrator, the Torstran Production Demonstrator. It will use waste heat from steel and glass manufacturing to convert renewable/waste methane into hydrogen for use as a process chemical in steel and glass manufacturing. The Torstran Production Demonstrator also produces a high value carbon product Torstran. Torstran is used as an Electro Magnetic Shielding (EMI) component in electric vehicle (EV) composite structures, and as a Li-ion battery additive further contributing to the low carbon economy. Torstran also has potential for use in conductive coatings and air filtration. Successful delivery of this project will contribute significantly to allowing the UK industry to achieve its environmental targets. This will be achieved by reducing the carbon footprint of the foundation industries (initially steel and glass making), replacing 'grey' hydrogen process gas (used as a reducing atmosphere) with near-zero CO2 hydrogen and contributing to the development of electric vehicle manufacturing in the UK. The project will immediately create high value jobs in the St Helens region with significant job growth anticipated as demand from the electric vehicle and other sectors increases.

This collaborative, cross sector R&D demonstration project furthers previous industrial research to advance & showcase novel technology developed to support transformation of Foundation Industry production process optimisation. The primary aim is to increase efficiency to achieve greater productivity by increased energy and resource efficiency. This will be achieved by using advanced robotics integrated with 3D machine vision systems which are augmented with bespoke sensors creating a data rich environment. The robotic, vision and sensory technology will be applied and demonstrated with foundation industry production processes building on previous R&D to digitally inspect defects in metals, glass and ceramics. With additional utilisation of machine learning (ML) on data collected, the advacned artificial intelligence (AI) developed can begin to enhance these traditional Foundation Industry production processes to enabling greater industrial productivity whilst significantly reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions in both glass, metals, and ceramic manufacturing. Current manufacturing methods are inflexible, often requiring the time-intensive pre-programming or manual intervention of production tasks responding to unexpected occurrences or production errors. This means that foundation industries are unable to respond to the demands of future environmental targets and cannot make further improvements within the manufacturing process until the production methods are updated. This is critical to address; success will allow UK manufacturing to remain competitive when facing increasing global competition where labour rates and emissions regulations are significantly lower. This project aims to use advanced 3D vision sensor data to produce ML and AI algorithms to monitor and improve the metals, glass and ceramic production process. To guarantee the repeatability and accuracy of measurement, automation through the flexibility offered by modern multi-axis robotic systems will be demonstrated. The ultimate output of the system will result in foundation industry-wide benefits in glass, ceramics, and metals production. This project will address specific needs in these foundation industries by offering an augmented, existing manufacturing process brought about by digitised inspection & intelligent machine learning. It is anticipated that a reduction in energy costs and improved production yields associated with the manufacture of tempered glass & kiln fired ceramic materials will be significantly and positively impacted, as is the case in the foundry castings industries.

In order for the UK to be carbon neutral by 2050, the country will have to widen the use of materials that provide exceptional benefits. To do this we need bold, game-changing innovations to be applied to our most energy consuming industries. This project will do just that by enabling the wider use of ceramics and thus enabling their energy saving properties to be used in the industries that use most of it. This project will enable the creation of industrial scale production, high quality Silicon Carbide parts, one of the most challenging materials to manufacture at a price that enables their widespread adoption within the Foundation Industries. Silicon Carbide is extremely hard, heat resistant (melts at 2730°C), abrasion and chemical resistant, and thermally conductive. These exceptional properties make Silicon Carbide ideal for a wide variety of applications. However, because it is also very hard it's extremely difficult to manufacture. This project will combine British inventions to create dense Silicon Carbide parts by an innovative additive manufacturing method using visible light selectively passing through LCD screen-based printers to make parts which will be subsequently infiltrated with silicon to bond with residual carbon to densify the parts to become usable dense Silicon Carbide parts. Furthermore, it will place the UK at the forefront of using novel materials that provide energy saving benefits, creating more jobs and providing technological benefits over Asian imported products. The project is led by Photocentric, with MTC as a technical partner, Kanthal as an industrial user and the Cast Metal Federation and Glass Futures as organisations who will enable its transfer through their members.

This project brings together partners from glass (Glass Futures, Encirc, Calumite, Glass Technology Services, Diageo), steel (British Steel, the Materials Processing Institute, Tata Steel) and cement (LKAB Minerals, Hanson) sectors to develop a novel process to combine waste-materials into blast furnace slag to 'up-grade' low-quality materials into an enhanced Ground-Granulated Blast Furnace Slag (GGBS), increasing the volume of GGBS available for the cement and glass sectors, whilst creating a new value-added product enabling increased percentages to be used in glass-manufacturing. GGBS, sold into the glass sector as 'Calumite', is widely used in container-glass manufacture, displacing silica-sand and limestone, reducing process CO2 emissions, increasing melting rate and reducing furnace energy. Calumite also provides sulphides which refine the molten glass, increasing product quality. In the cement industry, GGBS partially substitutes Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC). OPC is made in a high-temperature, energy-intensive process from limestone and other raw materials, thus GGBS offers a significant reduction in energy and CO2 emissions. The project will utilise pilot scale equipment at Glass Futures and the Materials Processing Institute to develop and optimise this new technology, before undertaking a series of industrial-scale trials at British Steel and various glass manufacturing plants, including Encirc. Large-scale feasibility studies will also be undertaken by LKAB to assess the suitability of these new materials for use in cement applications. The project will engage the paper and ceramics sectors to identify waste-streams that could be utilised in the e-GGBS process and explore ceramics applications which might benefit from e-GGBS.

Almath Crucibles Ltd manufactures and supplies ceramic products to a range of industries for their kiln and furnace processes. The environmental sustainability of kiln and furnace processes can be improved by reducing the total heat energy consumed in each run of the equipment, which can be achieved by using furnace furniture with lower mass and equivalent or better mechanical integrity. In this project, materials and structures based on ceramic composites will be developed which have superior mechanical properties and lower mass than conventional ceramic materials. Test specimens and demonstrators will be produced from the material and then tested for mechanical and thermal properties. A scale-up plan will be produced to ensure that the materials can be manufactured cost effectively at volume.

Glass is a reusable and recyclable material for windows and a reusable and recyclable alternative to plastic for containers. Sustainable glass is manufactured by melting sand in exceptionally large (the size of a low-rise block of flats), high temperature furnaces. However, the manufacturing process is very inefficient and up to 50% of the energy supplied for melting is lost as waste in the process. India produces ~10MT glass/year and is growing at between 6-10% CAGR. The Indian government has made ambitious targets around climate change, including reducing the emissions intensity of GDP by 33%--35% by 2030 below 2005 levels. This project with a duration of 5 months aims to develop close ties and relationships with counterparts in India in the area of glass manufacturing and research, and produce collaborative proposals between research centres in the UK and in India.

Glass and Steel manufacturing furnaces frequently operate at temperatures above 1400'C, creating a pressing need for new, cost-effective technologies to reduce NOx emissions and increase furnace efficiency to meet ever tightening regulatory requirements. Global Combustion Systems (GCS) have previously demonstrated (at lab and commercial-scale) an 'Auxiliary Injection' combustion technology for end-fired glass furnaces that has the potential to reduce NOx by more than 80% and increase furnace efficiency by as much as 3%. This project, supported by Tata Steel and Liberty Speciality Steels, will assess the performance of the GCS Auxiliary Injection technology for a range of new glass and steel furnace scenarios, using the Glass Futures 350kW combustion-test-bed furnace. A team from the University of South Wales will screen and select existing computer models to understand how to transfer the GCS technology into steel applications as well as to quantify potential benefits. A techno-economic review will be undertaken to assess the feasibility of the GCS technology for these furnace applications, which will be used to identify the further work required to de-risk the technology to the point at which it can be trialled on commercial furnaces.

The 'Deployment of End to End Process Control for Encirc's Elton site (DEEP Control)' project will deliver energy savings through deployment of new end-to-end control systems linking processes across the two Encirc Elton container-glass furnaces and associated 14 forming lines to facilitate: 1. Optimisation of furnaces to run at minimum energy whilst maintaining glass quality 2. Increased packed-to-melt efficiency through reduced defects/rejects in forming processes 3. Estimated total annual CO2 savings of more than 15kT/year Lack of communication between current furnace and forming areas of the production line delays feedback of issues, delaying corrective action and improvement opportunities. This project will use a MindSphere platform and Mendix-based dashboard to deploy new furnace and forming-section control systems, integrating both areas of the production process into one system. This will enable operators to maximise process efficiency through safely reducing the energy safety-margin required for reliable furnace operation. It will also help operators to identify operational trends so that processes can be corrected before defects occur. These control systems will be refined and optimised through a series of whole-line production trials. The new control systems to be deployed will be an enabler for implementation of future decarbonisation opportunities, e.g. hydrogen fuels and light-weighting of containers.

Each year in the UK, approximately there are 48 TWh/yr industrial waste heat sources which is equivalent to one sixth of overall industrial energy use. Of this amount of industrial waste heat, technically 11TWh/yr (2.2 MtCO2/yr) could be potentially recovered for useful purposes such as Combined Heat and Power (CHP) through specially designed energy conversion technologies. Globally one third of energy consumption is attributable to the industrial sector, with up to 50% ultimately wasted as heat. The market of power generation with industrial waste heat is thus enormous. The project will create an innovative CO2 transcritical power cycle (iT-CO2) for energy conversion systems with industrial waste heat. Instead of using an inapplicable CO2 liquid pump, a combined CO2 transcritical compressor and vapour-liquid ejector will be developed and installed in the system to create thermal-to-electrical efficiency of a target 30% (i.e. double state-of-the-art). The project outcomes will target heat-intensive industries such as steel, glass and other heat-intensive planets that require CHP solutions on sites or grid connections.

The EnviroAsh project brings together partners from across the six Foundation Industries \[Glass (Glass Technology Services, Glassworks Services Ltd, Encirc, Glass Futures Ltd), Ceramics (Wienerberger), Steel (British Steel Ltd), Paper (Saica), Cement (Hanson, Breedon), Chemicals (Power Minerals Ltd. - through its Biolite division, which converts an ash-waste into a fertiliser product)\], the Energy sector (Drax) plus key academic partners (Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) and the University of Sheffield (UoS) and supply-chain partners experienced in handling and processing wastes and raw materials (PML, LKAB Minerals). The project will identify opportunities to take waste ashes, slags, mineral by-products and filter dusts from across the FIs and convert them into new raw materials for a range of products produced within the glass, ceramic and cement Foundation Industry sectors. In exploring an end-to-end approach this project aims to identify routes to convert waste streams into new raw materials transforming disposal costs into opportunities for income generation by creating lower cost raw materials with potential to reduce environmental impacts of Foundation Industry manufacturing processes. The project will also explore how these new feedstocks might create opportunities to improve product performance in a cost-effective manner. The project will deliver practical lab and commercial-scale demonstrations of how these new waste-derived materials can be incorporated into existing products and processes, establishing a consortium, supply chain and new business models which can be applied to other waste streams within the FI and other energy intensive sectors.

Steelmaking slag from the integrated route, ie made from blast furnace hot metal, is demetalled, crushed and screened, and used to create tarmac for the top surface of roads. Its rate of arising in the UK is around 500ktpa. However, it's skid resistance is not high enough for the top grade of road surface. For these locations, virgin aggregate has to be imported with its associated quarrying and transport environmental impact. Modifying the slag to increase the silica content after it is tapped from the steelmaking vessel should improve its skid resistance to the level required for the top grade of road surface. The slag modifier could be slags arising elsewhere in the process route, such as desulphurisation slag, for which there is no ready use. Other likely sources of modifier are certain streams arising from the glass industry, including waste streams contaminated by aggregates, mixed colours, and fines, which cannot be returned to the process, and high silica arising refractory waste. Thus this project objective is to use slag arising within the steel industry, and streams of waste glass and refractory from the glass industry, all of which have no ready recycling route, to modify the slag from the steelmaking process. This will then produce an aggregate replacement of higher value. The project will make a number of new slags, at the kg scale, by taking existing steelmaking slag and modifying with a number of alternative high silica sources. Thermodynamic modelling will be used to define the mixtures to achieve the aim mineralogy. The slags will be tested to assess the improvement in skid resistance and abrasion resistance. The most promising blend will be produced in a full scale plant trial and will then be further tested. Any field trial of the new slag, ie a trial road surface, must fall outside the project due to the cost and timescale. The second activity of the project is to undertake a detailed assessment of the volumes and values of waste, or difficult-to-reuse, streams of appropriate material from within the glass industry and the steel works to determine the potential for use as a slag modifier.

This project brings together different foundation industries, bulk chemical and glass production, to realize shared opportunities for use of hydrogen by-product from functional carbon production as a supply to float glass manufacturing. This high-impact feasibility study has potential to add value to key UK industry sectors. The project partners are two Foundation Industry companies, an start up and a knowledge centre (University of Cambridge). The companies leading this proposal are world experts in functional carbon materials manufacturing (Q Flo) and glass manufacturing (Pilkington, NGS) and have strong track records of commercializing innovative manufacturing processes. The project directly addresses issues of resource utilization by delivering an innovative and cost-effective route to simultaneously produce clean and usable hydrogen alongside high value and usable carbon products. This will result in symbiosis in processes and industries. The project will demonstrate and evaluate the commercial potential of using methane feedstock to generate quality hydrogen gas and high value carbon products. Success will enable the UK to take an important lead in this emerging sector of common resource utilization technologies. It will also embed technology in the UK and open the potential to exploit significant export opportunities. The project represents Industrial Research that builds on the success of both existing commercial activities, as well as unique UK academic knowledge. Having secured the ability to produce advanced materials the project, if funded, will accelerate development of exploitation of an unused co-product, hydrogen, as a source for glass manufacturing. IUK funding will allow rapid development and trialling of this new technology for hydrogen production. This will include evaluation by members of the Foundation Industry sector for use as a process chemical. The output will be a robust, environmentally acceptable and investment ready process design for a production demonstrator scale plant. Although based in the UK, the project is international in its application and builds on innovation and research from grant and commercially funded work at the University of Cambridge; its successful completion will anchor this globally important technology in the UK. The collaboration with NSG, global players in the glass market, will open a global route to market. Delivering this project will facilitate advancement of the UK's goal of achieving a carbon zero economy while offering first mover advantage to manufacturing and development companies seeking to utilise high performance carbon based materials.