Research interests
Performance of Railway Assets
MPhil/PhD Research
Performance of fixed diamonds in complex railway S&C
Affiliated with Network Rail
Dr louis lepen, Dr William Powrie
Research Projects
Current Research:
Switches and crossings (S&C) constitute about 1% of the UK railway network by route distance yet account for some 20% of track maintenance and renewal costs. This is partly because by their nature they are complex structures that attract high and otherwise onerous loads. There is however a growing appreciation that they are not generally optimised in a systems sense, and that more could be done by way of improved design and maintenance methods to improve their performance and longevity.
Recent research has focused on understanding the real behaviour of switches and how it is influenced by their component parts. This project will extend that work to the fixed diamond element of crossings. It will involve field monitoring of fixed diamonds at 1-3 problematic or other locations on the UK network, to obtain baseline behaviour of actual performance. These data will be used to develop models of crossing behaviour for use in geotechnical and / or vehicle-track interaction (VTI) models, possibly in collaboration with the University of Huddersfield.
Affiliate research groups
Centre of Doctorial Training in Sustainable Infrastructure for Cities (CDT – STC), University of Huddersfield.
