The research focuses on understanding cohesive powder flow in flexible bulk solid containers (buggies and bulk bags) with a view to develop a design methodology for ensuring reliable discharge from these containers. The project involves experimental powder flowability characterisation, finite element analysis of the stresses in flexible containers and pilot scale experiments to study the powder flow field and validate the new design methodology for reliable discharge.

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.

Hydrogen is expected to be highly valuable energy carrier for the 21st century as it should participate in answering main societal and economical concerns. To exploit its benefits at large scale, further research and technological developments are required. In particular, the storage of hydrogen must be secured. Even if burst in service of pressure vessels in composite material is very unlikely, when exposed to a fire, they present safety challenges imposing to correctly size their means of protection.

The lack of an internal length scale parameter in classical continua leads to unrealistic numerical modelling of some phenomena related to the microstructure of the material such as size effect and strain localisation.