Advancing sustainable decentralised energy systems

The purpose of this research is to explore the strategic emergence of innovative distributed energy systems and smart consumers which underpins a radical departure away from unsustainable conventional energy systems. 

Faculty of Engineering

Biodiversity change in the Anthropocene

Supported by the Zoological Society of London, this project would suit someone who is interested in global change, and has some previous experience in coding (ideally R) and statistics.

School of Biological Sciences

Supervisor: Chris Clements

Understanding the effects of root surface structure on root-soil cohesion  

This project aims to disentangle the effects of soil-binding root secretions and friction-enhancing root surface topography.

School of Biological Sciences

What is the role of convective organisation on future extreme rainfall?

This is a partner project proposed by the UK Met Office. The student will apply novel metrics to quantify convective organisation in cutting-edge high-resolution convection-permitting climate simulations over the UK and South Africa, providing new insights into how convective storms may change with implications for flooding.

School of Geographical Sciences

The value of decadal forecasts to improve resilience of water supply

You will contribute to a novel area of climate services as well as have the opportunity to collaborate with scientists in the Faculty of Engineering as well as the Met Office. The project will also develop your network with commercial organisations as you will be interacting closely with water industry partners to ensure useful and usable outcomes.

Faculty of Engineering

Light-powered photocatalytic coatings for environmental remediation

The project is aimed at developing highly efficient and durable photocatalytic coatings based on a low-temperature ceramic coating system incorporated with TiO2/2D nanosheets heterojunctions.

Bristol Dental School

Global climate implications of rapid collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet

The project will address this gap in the literature by using a climate model in a suite of experiments forced with varying fluxes of freshwater entering the Southern Ocean and covering a range of potential rates and durations of collapse, and will assess impacts on key phenomena such as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and North Atlantic Overturning Circulation.

School of Geographical Sciences

The future of UK heat extremes and lessons from the past

A process-based analysis of the drivers of past heat extremes – those responsible for mortality in recent years – is urgently required if we are to have a full appreciation of how risks might change in the future. 

School of Geographical Sciences

Climate change's impact on extreme European rainfall

You will have the opportunity to learn how to analyse climate model simulations, including understanding extreme weather events. You will also get the chance to work with atmospheric scientists and hydrologists and develop rare interdisciplinary expertise, building links with our Met Office partner.

School of Geographical Sciences

Integrating resilience into flood modelling

This project looks into exploring how to embed resilience in flood impact models and evaluating resilience-based scenarios; it aims to pioneer a new generation of flood impact models.

Faculty of Engineering and the School of Geographical Sciences

How warm can you go? Modelling polar amplification in past climates

In this project we will use recent modelling results from the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project, coupled with the latest reconstructions of past marine and continental temperatures, to understand how and why the polar regions have warmed in Earth's history, from the baking "greenhouse" of the Eocene, ~50 million years ago, to the transition out of the last ice age, ~20 thousand years ago. 

School of Geographical Sciences

Design and construction of compartmentalised biomimetic microreactors for CO2 capture

The research program will develop synthetic methods to construct microcompartments capable of hosting the enzyme cascade reactions and establish a protocol for the fabrication of microreactors based devices.

School of Chemistry

Supervisor: Avinash Patil

Listening to the world through French environmental documentary

This project offers the chance to study representations of the natural world on screen from the unique perspective of the listener. You will analyse a selection of French environmental documentaries through a focus on sensory perception, examining how our listening inform our awareness of different habitats and life forms and increases our sensitivity towards the natural environment.

School of Modern Languages

Supervisor: Albertine Fox

This body, this earth: the human landscape of mining in narrative and visual culture (1850-1900)

This interdisciplinary project explores how nineteenth-century literature and visual culture in France, in the age of 'carboniferous capitalism' (Asa Briggs), can help us understand the capacity and the agency of the human body.

School of Modern Languages

Supervisor: Susan Harrow

Restoring the 3D Structure of Tropical Ecosystems - How Important is Tree Diversity?

This project will use cutting-edge airborne LiDAR acquired over the Sabah Biodiversity Experiment in Malaysian Borneo to test whether planting a diverse mixture of tree species leads to a faster recovery of canopy 3D structural complexity and carbon stocks.

School of Biological Sciences

Environmental themes, environmental science and wildlife filmmaking

This project explores the place of environmental themes within natural history filmmaking over the past 25 years and examines how advances in the environmental sciences inform filmmaking and feature on screen.

Department of History

The Radical Pacific : Artistic activism and experimentation on the Chilean Coast

In this project, you will explore how filmmakers, street artists and other creative practitioners on Chile's central coast, and especially in the port city of Valparaíso, have developed avant-garde responses to the inescapable and occasionally threatening presence of the Pacific Ocean in the 20th and 21st centuries.

School of Modern Languages

Supervisor: Paul Merchant

Lifestyles of extremophiles: understanding nutrient and energy flows through the cryosphere

This project will examine the cellular stoichiometry of a range of psychrophilic algal lineages relative to key abiotic stressors, to produce a robust understanding of their stoichiometric homeostasis across environmental regimes.

School of Geographical Sciences

Modelling the bio-cryosphere; how do glacier algal blooms contribute to the global carbon cycle?

Using the first numerical model of glacier algal blooms recently developed by Dr. Williamson, this project will investigage the large-scale role of Greenland Ice Sheet glacier algal blooms in the global carbon cycle. 

School of Geographical Sciences

What can the microbiome tell us about expanding ocean dead zones?

Climate warming and nutrient pollution have reduced oxygen concentrations in the ocean by more than 2% since the 1960s.  As a result, naturally occurring low-oxygen zones (also known as "dead zones") are expanding.  The ocean's microbiome holds the key to understanding how low-oxygen areas respond to present and future climate change.  This project will use genomic data in combination with biogeochemical modelling to assess the expansion of these zones across different regions of the global ocean.

School of Geographical Sciences

Understanding how multiple stressors impact ecological communities

This project will investigate how stressors such as climatic change, overharvesting and habitat fragmentation may interact to alter the extinction risk of species in small-scale experiments, and what measures might be implemented to reduce the risk of species extinctions.

School of Biological Sciences

Supervisor: Chris Clements

Renewable energy in the UK: connecting pasts and futures

This project proposes research on the history of renewable energies in the UK, to connect current and future policy-making with knowledge of how renewables industries have developed, learnt and adapted.

Department of History

Supervisor: Marianna Dudley

Skills shortage assessment and training provision for local energy projects

This project will undertake a qualitative and quantitative research to identify what skills are currently under-provisioned for in the UK energy sector and what training needs to be provided to fill in these "skills shortage" for successful transition to renewable-based energy system.

Department of Computer Science

Supervisor: Ruzanna Chitchyan

Aeroelastic design and optimisation of wind turbine blades

Our research focuses on the integrated and holistic aeroelastic design and optimisation of blades, which remain key research areas for the development of the next generation of wind turbines.

Faculty of Engineering

Supervisor: Terence Macquart

Assessing sustainability impact of software systems

This project will design empirical studies to assess the sustainability impact of a software system, consider the suitable quantification metrics for the environmental, societal, economic, and political impact of software systems, and undertake evaluation for a few sample case studies to demonstrate the proposed impact assessment approach.

Department of Computer Science

Supervisor: Ruzanna Chitchyan

Energy harvesting technologies for developing countries

The aim of the project is to design a prototype able to harvest enough energy to power a personal device. The prototype must be portable and cheap.  PLEASE NOTE that this project has been filled.

Faculty of Engineering

Supervisor: Alicia Gonzalez-Buelga

A new energy system architecture

This project will involve close engagement with community energy organizations to assess technological and business model feasibility.

Law School

Supervisor: Colin Nolden

Wind turbines for developing countries

This project will explore design concepts and manufacturing methods, using case study countries in the developing world, to provide realistic design constraints. It will also explore the financial schemes that might be necessary to help promote the widespread manufacture and deployment of turbines with maximum social and economic benefits.

Faculty of Engineering, Dept of Aerospace, Law School

Micro Hydropower Systems for Developing Countries

This project will support ongoing work in Nepal by addressing both the engineering and socio-economic challenges in promoting the widespread manufacture and deployment of turbines with maximum benefits to the local population.

Faculty of Engineering, Law School

Machine Learning for Wind Flow Modelling

Wind-flow models are key tools in describing how a wind resource varies across a wind farm project area. Models include linear models and more complex CFD models. We propose an alternative machine learning (ML) data-based model. The ML model will provide the wind industry with a tool that is computationally quick, easy to use, opensource based and delivers reliably accurate wind speed and energy estimates.

Faculty of Engineering

Machine Learning for Wind Farm Control

It is possible that the use of machine learning algorithms could provide a practical approach to the optimization of performance of wind farms on a project scale. We want to adapt largely autonomous data-driven new control strategies for wind turbines based on existing sensor information to optimize wind farm scale performance.

Faculty of Engineering

Sustainable business travel in a low carbon economy

For post-Covid-19 organisational practices: what is the future of business travel in the socially and environmentally responsible organisation.

School of Economics, Finance and Management

Supervisor: Jonathan Beaverstock

Turning sunlight into fuels: discovery of new catalysts for renewable energies

This project will create new organic functional materials to address current challenges in renewable energies, such as the use of electricity or light to power chemical transformations. 

Faculty of Engineering, School of Chemistry

Supervisor: Sebastien Rochat

Nanostructured Excitonic Superconductors

We hope to create the first superconductor that operates using an excitonic mechanism, which should be able to work at room temperature and pressure.

School of Chemistry

Supervisor: Simon Hall

Superconductivity in 3D

We have some very interesting avenues to explore in order to find such a material, one of which is to combine a metal organic framework with a nanostructured carbon molecule in order to create proximity-induced superconductivity. A crystal of this composite material has never been tested as a superconductor, so this project will make and test one and report on the superconducting properties.

School of Chemistry

Supervisor: Simon Hall

Energy storage with the use of phase change materials

The aim of this project is to look at the chemistry of existing phase change materials and to develop new, cheaper materials for specific engineering applications.

Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Chemistry

Learning framework for sustainability

The key aim of the project is to support learning and spread of sustainability-enabling practices and patters in engineering socio-technical systems.

Department of Computer Science

Supervisor: Ruzanna Chitchyan

Paris and the built environment 1850-1900: an interdisciplinary project

How can the built environment in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture in France help us understand today's environmental pressures and possibilities? Exploring Impressionist art, novels by Emile Zola, and a range of critical thought on cultural and material modernisation, this project will ask how textual and visual culture of the past can help us understand more deeply our present and, perhaps, our future.

School of Modern Languages

Supervisor: Susan Harrow

Validating apparent urban areas

The project will take novel urban boundaries developed by Wolf & Fox from remote sensing data and examine how coherent the boundaries are with respect to alternative data sources, such as twitter activity or daily movement and commute patterns.

School of Geographical Sciences

A comparative study of cycling cultures: Bristol-Bordeaux

This project explores the history of the so-called cycling revival in these twin cities and will offer a cultural understanding of the successes and failures of both. It will equally suggest a way forward for Bristol, exploring cycling's capacity to combat two immediate crises facing our city: overcrowded roads and poor health.

School of Modern Languages

Supervisor: Martin Hurcombe

Assessing sustainability impact of software systems

This project will design empirical studies to assess the sustainability impact of a software system, consider the suitable quantification metrics for the environmental, societal, economic, and political impact of software systems, and undertake evaluation for a few sample case studies to demonstrate the proposed impact assessment approach.

Department of Computer Science

Supervisor: Ruzanna Chitchyan

Building for the future

The project is about designing the future house, based on the existing and perhaps not yet - novel technology which should be introduced.

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering

The Radical Pacific: Artistic activism and experimentation on the Chilean coast

In this project, you will explore how filmmakers, street artists and other creative practitioners on Chile's central coast, and especially in the port city of Valparaíso, have developed avant-garde responses to the inescapable and occasionally threatening presence of the Pacific Ocean in the 20th and 21st centuries.

School of Modern Languages

Supervisor: Paul Merchant

Extreme events in the Anthropocene ocean

This project will use state-of-the-art modelling approaches to explore the risks posed to biodiversity by marine extreme events in the modern ocean and in the future.

School of Geographical Sciences

Supervisor: Oliver Andrews

Integrating resilience into flood modelling

This project looks into exploring how to embed resilience in flood impact models and evaluating resilience-based scenarios; it aims to pioneer a new generation of flood impact models.

Faculty of Engineering, School of Geographical Sciences

Artificial intelligence for environmental monitoring

This project will expand and explore the capacity for CNNs to be used in real-time environmental monitoring of UK freshwater systems.

School of Geographical Sciences

Investigating what controls marine N20 production

This project aims at incorporating for the first time the cycling of N2O in a process-based ocean model to represent the dynamics between the ecology, chemistry and physics of the ocean and determine the controls of N2O production for the modern and future climate ocean.

School of Geographical Sciences

Understanding agricultural azole use, impacts on local water bodies and AMR

Our project sets out to build a holistic and nuanced understanding of the use of agricultural azoles by conducting ethnographic research of farmers’ agricultural and water use knowledge and practices, together with a quantification of azoles in surface water associated with farmlands and a risk assessment of AMR.

Department of Civil Engineering, Bristol Veterinary School

Testing and cleaning water with fluorescent polymers

This project aims to demonstrate sensing properties of PIMs, and to show that they outperform similar small molecules. Proving the advantageous sensing properties of PIMs will pave the way to new applications of these materials in monitoring of liquid or air-based samples, for example for environment monitoring or public safety.

School of Chemistry, Faculty of Engineering

Supervisor: Sebastien Rochat

Machine learning for weather and climate extremes

You will have the opportunity to learn how to analyse weather and climate simulations and to train machine learning algorithms to produce a scientifically useful tool. This will give you very valuable expertise in both weather and climate science and AI. We would also expect there to be involvement with external partners that we work with, including the Met Office and other universities, providing an opportunity to make further links with the community of researchers and users.

School of Geographical Sciences, Department of Computer Science

Urban nature-based solutions - Revitalising the city?

In this project, you will critically assess how specific nature-based solutions are reshaping the politics of urban environmental governance processes, asking who benefits from these innovations, how they impact upon public access to urban space and participation in urban renewal, and even how they might alter our understandings of the forms of nonhuman life which are (or are not) welcome in cities of the future.

School of Geographical Sciences

Supervisor: James Palmer 

Life at the extreme: understanding the microbiome of the cryosphere

This project will investigate the composition and diversity of microbial communities in the cryosphere.

School of Geographical Sciences