Public Funding for Northstone (Ni) Limited

To develop a novel lightweight roof tile product by increasing the material efficiency and realising production efficiency savings. The work will develop new Eco series tiles, establish its carbon and performance credentials in line with Northstone's sustainability strategy.

There is an urgent need for high-value recycling routes for Glass Reinforced Polymer composites (GRP). At present almost all of the ~80 kt \[1\] of thermoset GRP scrap generated in UK and around 530 kt \[2\] in Europe goes to landfill or energy from waste annually. GRP scrap will increase with End-of-Life (EoL) wind turbine blades likely to reach over 20,000 tonnes/yr. in UK by mid 2030s \[4\]. WindEurope's call for ban on landfill of decommissioned wind turbine blades by 2025 adds greater pressure for new recycling options. Recyclability and recycled content are equally important in construction and automotive. While increased durability and lower weight make GRP products more sustainable in the long term, limited recycling options are already damaging the GRP industry. Today all processes for recycling GRP are down-cycling and none are available at scale in the UK. WindEurope, Cefic and EuCIA strongly endorse reprocessing composite waste to produce higher value recyclates enabling production of new composites \[3\] as essential as we move to a more circular economy. PRoGrESS will scale up and commercialise a globally unparalleled, patented process developed at lab scale by University of Strathclyde (UoS) for thermal recovery and post-treatment of glass fibres from GRP scrap to near virgin quality. enabling the UK to be an early player in a growing market for recycling blade waste among other GRP composites. The project will scale up fluidised bed recovery, evaluating low impact and energy efficient measures for emissions treatment, heat recovery, waste handling and processing of recycled glass fibres (rGF). It will validate the process with steady-state continuous operation, trialling wastes with varying constituents from diverse sources. Focus in the PRoGrESS project will be on usability, creating products as close as possible to virgin to avoid disruption to existing processes, while reducing energy inputs for intermediate products, estimated at nearly 1/4 of impacts today. PRoGrESS will also seek to drive down cost providing data and demonstrators to validate commercial scale-up. PRoGrESS is led by Composites UK, with Aker Offshore Wind (AOW) as commercialisation lead, SUEZ for waste management operations, GRP Solutions as material distributor, Cubis Systems to develop bulk moulding compounds, University of Strathclyde (Advanced Composites Group and Lightweight Manufacturing Centre) as primary academic partner, and expert input from University of Nottingham. Data extrapolated from \[1\] Composites UK; \[2\] EuCIA; \[3\] WindEurope, Cefic and EuCIA (Accelerating Wind Turbine Blade Circularity -- 2020); \[4\] Zero Waste Scotland.

The unfortunate Grenfell fire disaster, where 72 lives were lost, has gone down as one of the UK's worst disaster of modern time. As a way of preventing future occurrence of such tragedy, one of the key recommendations of government's commissioned report (Hackett,2018) suggests the need for intelligent systems of regulation and enforcement to facilitate compliance with arrays of regulations and standards, including Approved Document B, HTM05-02, BS9999, BS9991 and BB100, among others. This is also reinforced by several studies (e.g. Noren et al.,2018; Sun,2020) which suggested integration of fire performance diagnostics with Building Information Modelling (BIM) as optimal approach for mitigating fire disasters. However, development in such areas is hindered, as regulations and standards are written in natural languages, only comprehensible by domain experts, and not usually for machines to process. This implies that compliance with vital safety standards is prone to error, subjectivity, corner-cutting, and additional time in correcting non-conformances identified through manual processes. Advances in the field of machine learning and analytics offers opportunities for automating building safety requirement compliance check, which the proposed project seeks to implement. The project aims to create an intelligent innovative system (FireBIM), as BIM-based solution, consisting of two key elements as follows: Platform 1--Design Diagnostics Platform for Fire Performance Compliance (BIMFire-Diagnostics): This platform evaluates building design for compliance with fire safety standards and regulation, including Approved Document B, HTM 05-02, BS 9999, BS 9991 and BB100, by: (i)Automatically diagnosing proposed/as-built designs for compliance with provisions of targeted regulations/standards. (ii)Identifying areas of non-conformances with regulations and standards. (iii)Highlighting uncertified/unwarranted/uninsured areas, requiring detailing for approval. (iv)Suggesting improved and optimal design solutions. Platform 2--Materials and Components Decision Support for Fire Performance (BIMFire-DSS): Based on the requirements of building regulations and standards, up-to-date information from the industry and suppliers' information, this platform will provide decision supports for designers, contractors and building inspectors by: (i)Highlighting fire rating requirements for building elements. (ii)Digitising plethora of valid solutions for attaining compliance. (iii)Suggesting specific materials/detailing/specification for meeting performance standards. (iv)Flagging up materials/components/design solutions when unsafe for purpose. (v)Developing database of tested and certified materials/components. The project employs machine learning to train intelligent model that will identify and predict building regulations infringements/non-conformances in building designs. Text mining will be implemented to translate standards/regulation documents into machine-understandable formats, with automated reasoning and inference mechanism applied to the machine processable information for automated compliance diagnostics.

To create an engineering knowledge base for an innovative range of modular lightweight glass reinforced plastic sealed chambers to compete against heavy concrete equivalent sealed chambers