Sustainability research projects archive

Dr Sami Ullah is part of a consortium project worth £2.5 million which is a joint project of eight national institutes including Keele, NERC's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Lancaster, British Geological Survey, Liverpool University, University of Lancaster, University College London, Rothamsted Research and James Hutton Institute.

Out of the total £2.5 million grant from NERC, £270,868 is directly awarded to Keele to investigate the impact of landscape position and land use type on soil denitrification rates (sequential reduction of mineral nitrogen to N2O and N2 gases) in the Ribble and Conwy River watersheds in UK.

Dr Ullah says that in a global change and food security context, mineral nitrogen as a fertilizer and as a water and air pollutant have significant ecological and socio-economic implications. Therefore, knowing the impacts of fertilizers and land use changes on soils nitrogen pools and fluxes with the atmosphere through denitrification at landscape scale is of critical importance to fill in data gaps for simulating long-term and large-scale nitrogen budgets together with that of C and P in the UK.

Contact Sami Ullah for more information.

RECCKN is one of seven interdisciplinary projects funded by the ESRC and EPSRC under their Energy and Communities collaborative venture. It is worth £0.5m and will run from 2011 to 2013. The RECCKN team comprises Neil Simcock (Research Assistant) , Andrew Dobson, Philip Catney, Sherilyn MacGregor (Research Institute for Social Sciences), Mark Ormerod, Zoe Robinson (Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics Research Institute), and Simon Ross (Marches Energy Agency).

While tackling energy issues at an individual level is important, we know less about the potential for community-level initiatives as a context for sustainable patterns of consumption. We use a case study methodology to conduct focused or paired comparisons of two communities, in Newcastle-under-Lyme and Shrewsbury respectively, with different socio-economic profiles. Our aim is to explore ‘knowledge networks’ in these communities: the ways in which information about energy is shared between people and organisations. We expect the differences between Newcastle-under-Lyme and Shrewsbury to generate a range of contrasting insights for understanding how energy-relevant knowledge circulates within different communities.

These are the questions we want to answer:

• Does knowledge about energy consumption and reduction travel within community networks? If so, how?
• What are the roles of different actors/organisations/channels in disseminating this knowledge?
• What are the barriers to energy-saving?
• What forms of knowledge exist about energy? How can these help or hinder efforts to reduce energy consumption?
• How do energy consumption and knowledge networks vary between different communities?
• What lessons can we learn for policy and practice?

By investigating knowledge networks, we move away from the idea that information provision in a top-down direction is what is needed to make people ‘change their behaviour’. We recognise that people already possess tacit knowledge about energy practices in everyday life, and that if new knowledge about energy use is to be injected into people’s lives, it will have to be done using existing networks that they trust and that are grounded in their own contexts. Our findings will be valuable across a range of energy policy contexts, including fuel poverty and the Coalition government's Green Deal.

Thermo-acoustic and aero-acoustic nonlinearities in green combustors with orifice structures

Combustion instabilities represent a serious problem for combustion-driven devices, such as gas turbine engines and domestic burners. These instabilities cause intense pressure oscillations, which in turn cause excessive structural oscillations, fatigue and even catastrophic damage to combustor hardware. In recent years, the development of clean combustion systems with reduced pollution of the environment has become a priority; however, such systems are particularly prone to combustion instabilities. There is an urgent need to understand the physical processes that are responsible so that methods to predict and prevent these instabilities can be developed.

The research in TANGO is intended to address these issues. Fundamental studies will give physical insight into the three-way coupling between sound, combustion and vortices in a combustion chamber. On the applied side, TANGO will develop active and passive control methods to allow safe operation of gas turbines on a variety of fuels and operating conditions.

TANGO is a multi-disciplinary project that provides training for 13 Early Stage Researchers and 1 Experienced Researcher in fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, mechanical and control engineering, all from an analytical, numerical and experimental perspective. The consortium has been chosen so as to bring together complementary skills from internationally renowned experts from both academia and industry. The "icing on the cake" of this large engineering project is the number of female scientists involved: 5 out of the 9 scientists in charge are women. It is expected that this will act as a magnet for young women who are considering a career in science or engineering. The network thus addresses the EU policy of increasing the number of female researchers in Europe. In order to promote the public understanding of science, the researchers will engage in various outreach activities.

For more information please contact: Dr Maria Heckl, School of Computing and Mathematics.

More on TANGO here