For many years, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) operators have been utilising their air platforms in sandy and dusty environments with insufficient understanding of the damage and cost of ownership issues this can cause. This damage ranges from engine degradation due to ingested particulate, to airframe abrasion and blade erosion on rotorcraft. All of these place additional maintenance costs and considerations on the operator and in exceptional circumstances can result in the total loss of the platform. Whilst the damage that occurs on platforms operating in sand and dust can be defined in a qualitative manner, attempts to quantify damage and the rate at which it transpires is an ongoing process. There is thus a motivation to better understand and quantify engine damage and to ultimately carry out intelligent predictions of platform damage and the punitive costs associated with it. This ICASE project aims to make advances in the quantitative knowledge of gas turbine engine damage due to particulate ingestion and is a new partnership between The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (dstl), the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE) and the School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Science (SEAES) from the University of Manchester.