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The School of Engineering at MMU has longstanding research into many aspects of railway engineering. This commenced in 1998 under the leadership of Professor Simon Iwnicki, who carried out research into the interaction between railway vehicles and the track. The understanding of the dynamics of the wheel rail contact that has resulted from this work has been developed into a number of tools and techniques that are being used on a daily basis by the rail industry both to design new railway systems and to predict the deterioration of railway wheels and rails. This allows railway engineers to predict and control roughness growth on rails and to optimise wheel profiles and maintenance intervals on wheel and track.
This work is now helping the railway industry internationally to realise both economic and environmental impacts as track maintenance costs are reduced, safety levels are enhanced and passengers continue to switch from road to rail in increasing numbers. This is evidenced by the award of new research contracts and industry funding and by direct input into industry standards.
ERPE, through the application of XiTRACK technology (using advanced polyurethane polymers to reinforce the ballast matrix, enhancing strength, stiffness and resilience) — has reduced track maintenance by a factor of up to 40, increased maintenance intervals from 3-monthly to 10 years with track speeds increased up to 125 mph in critical sections of the UK, Italy and Hong Kong rail networks. Developments in Finite Element (FE) geomechanics related to Rayleigh waves are used by HS2; and FE backed artificial neural networks are informing US High Speed operators on ground borne vibrations. The financial impact of XiTrack is estimated at least £50M; and avoidance of Rayleigh wave problems and ground borne vibration mitigation, in the region of £10M; plus benefits to millions of passengers.
The Railway Systems Group develops state-of-the-art condition monitoring and instrumentation systems that identify system faults before they degrade into failures that cause passenger disruption. The key impacts of the Railway Systems Group lie in the following areas:
Examples of direct quantifiable impact are a reduction of over 60,000 minutes in train delays over the last one year period through monitoring of 5,600 railway point machines (the cost to Network Rail of delays is between £20/min to £160/min). Also, the deployment of an award winning conductor shoe monitoring system, which has resulted in an estimated savings of 12,150 minutes. Expert advice and practical prototypes have been through active contracts from railway companies totalling £4.2M. This includes an influence in the £7 billion successful order from the Department for Transport to Hitachi for new trains, energy saving strategies reported by the Office of the Rail Regulator and evidence to the Transport Select Committee on winter operations. These have been achieved by working extensively with the British and international railway industries in the area of condition monitoring and bespoke instrumentation systems that support an improvement in the dependability of rail travel.
A University of Nottingham research programme on rail human factors, in collaboration with Network Rail, has delivered significant impact to practitioners and professional services within the industry. New tools for workload management and efficiency are now routinely used as part of Network Rail's ergonomics toolkit and are supporting the fulfilment of the company's National Operating Strategy. Risk analysis tools have also contributed to Network Rail's programme providing enhanced asset information.
These tools have also been taken up by international train operators in Australia and the Netherlands.
Research at the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering (DoEng) has led to the creation of a method for measuring strain throughout a range of civil engineering structures using Distributed Fibre Optic Sensing (DFOS) and computing the stresses in these structures. This detailed information and associated insights have reduced reliance on conservative safety margins, while giving greater assurance of safety. The result has been significant reductions in construction materials and construction time. The work has generated direct savings of over GBP15M in three major infrastructure projects from 2011 to 2013 including Crossrail. It has had a wider influence across the whole industry by setting standards for geothermal piles in 2012, which were instrumental in the creation of this new industrial sector, and by changing attitudes in construction about the value of instrumentation and modelling.
The UK Rail Industry has set itself a target of increasing capacity by a factor of two within 30 years for both passengers and freight. A central problem is to increase the capacity and performance of the (existing) rail network. Signalling systems and their safety is a major consideration. It is towards this long-term goal that we direct our research activity on signalling. Our research impacts both current practices and strategic planning within the Railway Industry:
Collaboration between the University of Southampton and scientists at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has resulted in the adoption of new statistical design of experiments and modelling methods for the confirmation of a robust operating region for the industrial production of new drugs. These methods have enabled larger numbers of factors to be investigated simultaneously than previously possible, improving scientific understanding of the chemical processes and producing savings of time, money and effort. Southampton's new methods were used in a key process required for the registration of a new skin cancer drug with the US Food and Drug Administration, where the research enabled the verification of a robust operating region to be completed in a third of the previous time.
Reductions in railway infrastructure and operating costs, through efficiency gains, deliver benefits to taxpayers (via lower subsidies) and/or passengers (via lower fares). Research undertaken by the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) at the University of Leeds from 2005 onwards revealed a 37% efficiency gap in relation to rail infrastructure costs and operations, relative to international best practice. The key impact of this research was to inform the Office of Rail Regulation's (ORR) setting, in 2008, of annual efficiency targets for Network Rail for the subsequent five-year period, resulting in a reduction in costs from £18.2bn to £15.8bn over the five year regulatory `control period' starting 2009/10. A secondary impact of the ITS Leeds research was to provide key benchmarking and evidence in more recent ORR efficiency assessments (2010) and Sir Roy McNulty's long-term policy-setting Rail Value for Money (VfM) study (2011). Extending the reach of these research impacts, the water and sewerage regulator OFWAT has, from 2013, adopted the ITS Leeds approach for its latest periodic review.
The development of the bespoke finite element software ICFEP (Imperial College Finite Element Program) is the main research outcome of the numerical group in the Geotechnics Section at Imperial College (IC). The research conducted in the Section since 1993 has led to a substantial growth of ICFEP's modelling capabilities in both complexity and robustness, following closely the advancements in understanding of real soil behaviour achieved through laboratory and field investigations of soils. Between 2008 and 2013 the application of these modelling capabilities to practical engineering problems, which are generally unavailable with a similar degree of sophistication in commercial software, amounts to over 80 projects of which a third are worth multi-billion pounds in global value. The impact of ICFEP's application has been to reduce the geotechnical risk and the cost of design and construction, and to give confidence in the environmental stability of design solutions, by providing accurate predictions of soil response associated with individual projects.
This case study describes the impact of the work at the University in the field of rail and road vehicle aerodynamics, which has primarily been through the integration of research into UK and EU standards and codes of practice. This has resulted in impacts on practitioners and professional services in the field of rolling stock and infrastructure construction and operation, and has also provided information for industrial testing work and for use in expert witness work. Specifically the work has been incorporated into the following codes and standards.
The methodology in these codes is widely used by the railway industry in the UK and Europe in train and infrastructure design, and indeed in some situations their use is obligatory. The work has also directly informed recent testing work for Network Rail and HS2 (via Arup) that have addressed fundamental issues associated with major electrification projects for the former and basic track spacing determination for the latter. It has been used in two court cases that were concerned with lorries blowing over.