Over the past ten years, ca. US$ 5.6 billion has been spent on hazardous fuel reduction to treat an average of ca. 2.5 million acres per year across the United States. These expenditures represent one of the primary strategies for the mitigation of catastrophic wildland fire events. At the local scale, the placement and implementation of fuel reduction treatments is complex, involving trade-offs between environmental impacts, threatened and endangered species mitigation, funding, smoke management, parcel ownership, litigation, and weather conditions. Because of the cost and complexity involved, there is a need for implementing treatments in such a way that hazard mitigation, or other management objectives, are optimized.

This project will design, build, install and operate an open ocean 4.5MW tidal energy farm in the Inner Sound in the Pentland Firth, off the Northern coast of Scotland. The project ("Clearwater") will demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of a multi-turbine tidal energy array, an essential step to catalyse development of commercial projects in the EU ocean energy industry. Project Clearwater provides a credible, robustly implemented transition from high cost single turbine demonstration deployments of marine turbines to economically viable multi-hundred turbine arrays in oceans and managed water assets across Europe and the wider global market.

Pore wetting is a principal control of the multiphase flows through porous media. However, the contact angle measurement on other than flat surfaces still remains a challenge. In order to indicate the wetting in a small pore, we developed a new pore contact angle measurement technique to directly measure the contact angles of fluids and gas/liquid/supercritical CO2 in micron-sized pores under ambient and reservoir conditions in this study, as well as the effect of chemical functional groups on pore contact angle.

To address the need for effective vis response photocatalysts, we have synthesised WO3 and TiO2 nanowires to provide a fast transport channel for the photo-generated electrons which can retard the charge recombination. We are working on improving the visible activity of the catalysts through modifying the nanocomposites using metal (Ag, W, V, Fe, Ni) and non-metal (C, N, B, S) elements, and through the control over the microstructure or even over the crystal phase.