The Future Homes Project (FHP) is an industry-academic partnership for the delivery of new and existing net zero homes - a significant challenge for the UK and globally. Regulatory change is driving developers and asset owners to seek new solutions to ensure homes meet the needs of net zero performance, as well as future climate and occupant satisfaction. Using the unique facilities at the University of Salford (Energy House 2.0 and Salford Energy House), the partnership will develop net zero solutions for the housing sector, conducting research under controlled conditions using demonstrator homes built within the facilities. This allows net zero solutions to be explored under controlled repeatable conditions, an approach not possible anywhere else globally. Previous work in these facilities has shown that this provides innovators with robust useable data about their innovation far quicker, allowing innovations to reach market more quickly than using conventional approaches, including field trials. The FHP brings together housing developers, asset owners, and their supply chains, with the research team, to gain an understanding of energy efficiency that products and systems will bring for operational performance. This can be explored at the individual product level and generates an understanding of how they work at the whole-house level, considering issues such as overheating, noise and indoor air quality, factors that can significantly impact occupants. This work is extended by developing digital tools and process improvements that allow these solutions to be scaled up, meaning they can be more rapidly deployed, with more confidence of their actual performance in use and ensuring technical barriers to adoption are removed. The research team will support this deployment by bringing independence and technical knowledge to support demonstration projects and field trials during the life of the project. By bringing together leading industry partners, the FHP will have a far-reaching impact on the delivery of new and retrofit homes, as well as supporting the wide range of companies (heating, cooling, ventilation, controls, digital, materials, delivery) within the complex housing supply chain, bringing together innovations in net zero solutions for housing. This will not only deliver net zero homes but create the opportunities for Clean Growth that will come from the innovative work, creating policy, economic and social benefits for Greater Manchester and the UK.

The Future Homes Project (FHP) is an industry-academic partnership for the delivery of new and existing net zero homes - a significant challenge for the UK and globally. Regulatory change is driving developers and asset owners to seek new solutions to ensure homes meet the needs of net zero performance, as well as future climate and occupant satisfaction. Using the unique facilities at the University of Salford (Energy House 2.0 and Salford Energy House), the partnership will develop net zero solutions for the housing sector, conducting research under controlled conditions using demonstrator homes built within the facilities. This allows net zero solutions to be explored under controlled repeatable conditions, an approach not possible anywhere else globally. Previous work in these facilities has shown that this provides innovators with robust useable data about their innovation far quicker, allowing innovations to reach market more quickly than using conventional approaches, including field trials. The FHP brings together housing developers, asset owners, and their supply chains, with the research team, to gain an understanding of energy efficiency and carbon dioxide emissions reduction improvements that products and systems will bring for operational performance and the impact of the materials used in the products. This can be explored at the individual product level, but also generate an understanding of how they work at the whole house level, considering issues such as overheating, noise and indoor air quality, factors that can significantly impact occupants. This work is extended by developing digital tools and process improvements that allow these solutions to be scaled up, meaning they can be more rapidly deployed, with more confidence of their actual performance in use and ensuring technical barriers to adoption are removed. The research team will support this deployment by bringing independence and technical knowledge to support demonstration projects and field trials during the life of the project. By bringing together leading industry partners, the FHP will have a far-reaching impact on the delivery of new and retrofit homes, as well as supporting the wide range of companies (heating, cooling, ventilation, controls, digital, materials, delivery) within the complex housing supply chain, bringing together innovations in net zero solutions for housing. This will not only deliver net zero homes but create the opportunities for Clean Growth that will come from the innovative work, creating policy, economic and social benefits for Greater Manchester and the UK.

Quantum technology -- mapping and map integration for buried assets (QT-MIBA) seeks to evaluate the feasibility of obtaining and publishing more complete and accurate information on the location of buried assets through enhanced processing of geophysical sensor data. The goal of QT-MIBA is to address the accidental strikes on underground utility pipes and cables that cost the country £1.2bn a year as well as reducing the traffic delays caused by utility streetworks estimated as 6.16 million days of work lost between 2014-2015\. It will also prevent incidents of workers accidentally hitting gas and electric pipes and thereby endangering their lives and interrupting supply of services to customers. QT-MIBA represents a major collaboration between Great Britain's national mapping agency and world-leading geospatial authority, an asset owner, a survey company, a data processing SME and an academic partner leading the application of quantum technology sensors for civil engineering applications. The project aligns with quantum technology sensor development, by providing a roadmap and value assessment of the data to end users. It also supports the initiative promoted by the Geospatial Commission to bring together existing data on underground infrastructure currently held by individual organisations (both privatised and non-privatised) to create a National Underground Asset Register (NUAR). OS and NWL currently collaborate on a pilot project in the North East to explore how accurate geospatial data can reduce the likelihood of utility strikes, improve underground infrastructure maintenance and inform new-build development projects. While bringing together existing buried infrastructure data is a significant step forward, there are many questions about the quality of this existing data, including omissions. There is, then, a role for data derived from geophysical surveys to update statutory record data. QT-MIBA will deliver a feasibility study to assess how data from QT, combined with data from traditional geophysical sensors, can be enhanced using novel processing techniques including Artificial Intelligence, deep learning and quantum machine learning. Moreover, it will develop protocols which will enable survey data collected at disparate locations across the network to be integrated into geospatial maps. This will enable an assessment of the value of enhancing the positional accuracy of buried asset records without the need to wait until they are dug up for maintenance.

"Despite our increasing ability to detect and monitor objects that exist on land, sea, around buildings or in space, our ability to detect objects beneath the ground has not improved significantly. When it comes to attempting to locate a buried and forgotten pipe, telling the extent of a sink hole or assessing the quality of infrastructure we still often resort to digging or drilling holes. This presents a huge economic and societal cost as road networks are dug up, oil wells are dry or brown-field land is left undeveloped. Existing techniques are all fundamentally limited in either their sensitivity (classical microgravity), their penetration (Ground Penetrating Radar) or their cost (seismic). For over 30 years, universities and academics have been exploiting the strange effects of quantum superposition to measure gravity with astonishing sensitivity. Using a process called cold-atom interferometry, the wave-partial duality of a rubidium atom is compared to the phase of a laser beam in a way which can detect very small changes in the way atoms fall freely in a vacuum. Changes in this free-fall can be used to determine the local strength of gravity and if this measurement is sensitive enough, the measurement can be used to tell whether there are voids, pipes, tunnels, oil and gas reserves in the ground beneath your feet. Although the potential is there, there are huge scientific and engineering challenges to delivering this performance. This project is proposed by the UK consortium of the best scientific and engineering companies the UK has to offer. Working with leading UK universities, these companies are looking to overcome these challenges, and develop a new industry of 'quantum' cold-atom sensors in the UK. If these advanced performances can be demonstrated, the economic and societal benefit of this new 'quantum' industry in the UK is expected to be significant and long-lasting."

QT-PRI is a collaboration between RSK, Atkins, Network Rail and the University of Birmingham (UoB) to establish the Quantum Technology (QT) gravity sensor market opportunities against assessment of current geophysical technologies to detect and assess the condition of assets buried below the railway network, in particular drains, as well as water flow through the railway earthworks. There are over 190,000 railway earthworks and over 6000km buried assets. The incomplete asset inventory significantly limits the development of a framework to allow proactive condition assessment thereby maximising the limited resources and keeping the rail network operational. Currently, geophysical sensors are commercially used to detect the location of the ducts and pipes in roads and with limited success on the railways, but are rarely used to detect the asset condition or the condition of the parent asset (earthwork) itself. QT-PRI will open up a new market for QT gravity sensors by: 1) Assessing in detail the capability and limitations of QT gravity sensors benchmarked against current geophysical sensors for the railway environment; 2) Increasing the marketplace for the sensors by engagement with the client base, excellent dissemination activities, and practical field demonstrations.

The coming gravity sensors based on Quantum Technologies (QT) have the potential to disrupt existing surveying practices through dramatically improved measurement sensitivities. GRAM is a collaboration between Teledyne e2v, RSK, the Canal & River Trust, the Coal Authority, Cranfield University and the University of Birmingham (UoB) to establish the Quantum Technology (QT) gravity sensor market opportunities against assessment of current geophysical technologies to determine soil compaction for precision agriculture, detection of water levels in disused mines and mineshafts and canal & river embankment leak detection. GRAM will baseline the capabilities of existing sensor technologies in the sectors identified, provide technical specification and performance requirements to the manufacturers of prototype and commercial QT gravity sensors and establish a market pull from the end users of the information generated by the sensors. Moreover, it will provide a market sizing and market penetration assessment to determine the size of the potential markets, analyse the competitors and determine the cost brackets for each of the three applications together with expected survey methodologies.

The presence of sinkholes, mineshafts and other buried objects under construction sites is a huge problem in civil engineering. These underground openings are a risk to the health and safety of people working on the site. They are also a risk after construction work has been completed as they can move and increase in size over time and may open up causing a building; a road or a bridge to subside or collapse with devastating effect. The REVEAL project aims to develop a quantum gravimeter which can be used for subterranean surveying to identify these underground objects before construction takes place. This reduces the risk for people working on the site and allows remedial work to be carried out before building takes place, decreasing the risk of future structural problems. The project aims to produce an instrument with at least twice the sensitivity of competing classical gravimeters so that even smaller and deeper holes in the ground can be detected.