Perspectives Issue 2 / December 2016

Helping to ensure the UK’s future food security through ‘precision soil mapping’ Precision farming involves dividing farmed land into management zones which have specific characteristics – soil being the most important. Using such precision data has been proven to lead to better yield results across all crops when compared to traditional and conventional farming ‘whole field’ approaches. However, to date, the perceived high cost of entry has proved a barrier for many small-scale farmers seeking to adopt precision farming techniques. Our Soil and Agrifood Institute is part of a collaborative two-year project aiming to help arable farmers and landowners from all over the UK make a more affordable entry into precision farming through the production of a high resolution digital soil map. This project has already attracted considerable media interest, including a magazine article in Farmers Weekly and a broadcast piece on BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today programme among numerous others (see page 26).

Our Nano Membrane Toilet is no flash in the pan The Nano Membrane Toilet project has secured additional major funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support its next phase of development.

Dr Alison Parker from the Cranfield Water Science Institute said: “The new funding will support our research teams in Water, Energy and Power, and Design to tackle the considerable challenge of turning the laboratory prototype into a product for the marketplace. We believe the Nano Membrane Toilet will be a sustainable sanitation solution for the huge number of people around the world who currently find it hard to access a clean and affordable toilet in their home.” An estimated 2.4 billion people live without improved sanitation, and diarrhoea caused by poor sanitation and unsafe water kills 315,000 children every year. For the past four years, Alison and her team has been working on this pioneering, multi-disciplinary project to develop a practical toilet for densely populated urban communities. The challenge originally set was that the toilet must function without water or plumbing, be small enough to fit in people's homes, be appealing enough that people want to use it, and be constructed and delivered in a way that makes it possible for families and communities to be able to have access to clean, private toilet facilities.

Lead project partner AgSpace Agriculture employs high resolution satellite data processed using a soil brightness algorithm to show where soil quality variation exists within fields. This dataset will be analysed by our experts and modelled alongside our national ‘Land Information System (LandIS)’, providing Britain’s most comprehensive soil datasets, to produce a new ‘precision soil map’. This should present an economically viable alternative to the current labour intensive method of field soil surveys, with growers able to increase yields with lower input costs and reduced environmental impact. The project is being led at Cranfield by Dr Stephen Hallett who said: “This project aims to make precision farming more affordable for arable farmers and landowners throughout England, Scotland and Wales, drawing together a unique set of data to produce meaningful soil management zones. If these approaches prove successful, AgSpace and Cranfield have ambitions to develop these techniques in other parts of the world, most notably Africa.

Some of the recent innovations and improvements to the toilet are highlighted in a new video. Most recently showcased in Mumbai, India, at the Toilet Investment Summit, it continues to attract exposure worldwide with World Toilet Day in November further helping to raise awareness and inspire action to tackle the global sanitation crisis. How it works The Toilet uses a waterless flush; a unique rotating mechanism that drops the waste into a holding tank while simultaneously blocking odour and the user's view of the waste. The solids then settle to the bottom of the tank, while the liquids float on the top. The solids are transported out of the tank by a mechanical screw into a combustor where they are burnt and transformed into ash. The heat generated can be converted into electricity which is used to power toilet operations, and any residual energy is used for charging mobile phones or other low voltage items. The liquids pass over a weir in the holding chamber and into the membranes bundle. The unique nanostructured membrane allows clean water to be extracted from the waste which can subsequently be used in the household for washing or watering plants. It is designed for single-household use (up to 10 people) and accepts urine and faeces as a mixture. It is small and easy to transport to locations where there is no access to a water supply and sewer. more online

World's food security “Ensuring the world’s food security is becoming an increasing challenge, and rapid population growth means it’s high on the agenda for a lot of countries. According to the 2008 United Nations sustainable development forum, more food will have to be grown in the next 50 years than has been produced during the past 10,000 years combined. “One way to achieve this is by managing farm resources using advanced technologies in precision agriculture. Precision farming technologies and ‘big data’ techniques play an important role in helping ensure sustainable food production.” The technical approaches involved will draw on our long-standing experience handling and managing national scale datasets; we hold and manage the national land information system for England and Wales, LandIS, on behalf of Defra (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs). We are receiving more than 25% of the near £750,000 funding via Innovate UK, together with income from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). As well as project leads AgSpace Agriculture, who devised the soil brightness technology being used, other partners are Agri-EPI Ltd (we are hosting one of the new UK centres of agricultural innovation, the Agri-EPI Centre, on the Cranfield campus), the James Hutton Institute based in Aberdeen which holds the equivalent soil datasets in Scotland, and Courtyard Agriculture (trading as IPF).

New airport system to save time, money and carbon emissions

Mars mission is a successful one for Team CranSpace! A team of our graduates and researchers won $10,000 for their proposal for a two-person flyby mission to the Red Planet.

With increasing global demand for air travel and overloaded airport facilities, the inefficient movement of planes (or ‘airport taxiing operations’) is identified as a major contributor to unnecessary fuel burn and a substantial source of pollution.

They topped nine other teams of engineering students from universities around the world, including MIT and Purdue University in the USA, in the Gemini Mars competition organised by The Mars Society. The team, known as CranSpace and featuring some of our Astronautics and Space Engineering MSc 2016 graduates as well as PhD students, presented their plans to aerospace experts, including NASA representatives, to win first prize in Washington DC. Participants were asked to design a mission which could be launched as cheaply, safely and simply as possible by no later than 2024. The CranSpace project, planned in their ‘free’ time, included a design of the modules astronauts would live in and living factors such as oxygen provision during the journey, as well as the general health of the astronauts. Speaking on behalf of our Space Group, an effervescent Professor Dave Cullen said: “We’re all on cloud nine – it’s a fantastic validation of our activities here that a team of our MSc and PhD students can win such a prestigious global competition. We’re immensely proud of every one of them.”

We are involved in developing a pioneering new aircraft routing and scheduling system that could see operations increase by 50% at some of the world’s busiest airports. This is in the TRANSIT (Towards a Robust Airport Decision Support System for Intelligent Taxiing) three-year collaborative project. TRANSIT is developing a new on-the-ground system that will reduce plane taxi times, operating costs and environmental impact at airports around the world. It is producing a new algorithm to quickly compute the most suitable route for guiding aircraft from one location to another, using data from airports around the world. Dr Mudassir Lone from our Centre for Aeronautics is an expert in aerospace modelling and simulation. He is facilitating the complex mathematical algorithms created during the project. These will then be fed into the University's aircraft simulator so aircraft conditions can be replicated. This will then be tested by pilots from our National Flying Laboratory Centre (NFLC) using the cutting- edge simulator. Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), we are collaborating with project leads University of Lincoln, as well as the universities of Sheffield and Stirling, together with major industry partners Rolls-Royce, Air France KLM, BAE Systems, Manchester Airport and Zurich Airport. Mudassir said: “This research has the potential to increase airport capacity, while reducing the environmental impact of the growing aviation sector. The aim is to change the way in which we manage an aircraft’s propulsion system during ground operations so it is more efficient and environmentally friendly. Our focus here is on demonstrating the developed technologies and conducting piloted evaluations using the engineering flight simulators and NFLC pilots.” It is hoped that the TRANSIT system will eventually be adaptable for different-sized airports all over the world, and could even pave the way for automated taxiing.

One of the team, Tiago Matos de Carvalho who is studying for his PhD with us, said: “I think this prize will make a difference to our careers. We had to work together in our own time and work out how to reach out beyond the space engineering community to the wider public with our research and to get support for our work. All of this will be valuable in our careers, either in academia or in industry.” Other CranSpace members were Dale Wyllie, Robert Sandford, Mario Cano, Daniel Grinham, Roland Albers, Guillaume Renoux and Will Blackler. Earlier this year, Will won Airbus’ annual National Student Space Competition award for his proposal to use algae to create oxygen onboard a spacecraft for long space missions. The Mars Society is the world’s largest and most influential space advocacy organisation dedicated to the human exploration and settlement of the Red Planet.

Perspectives Keeping staff informed December 2016

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