An advanced welding station with integrated non destructive testing (NDT) and adaptive control is being designed to demonstrate how increased weld completion rates can be achieved for reduced cost, whilst retaining and demonstrating a high quality product. The supply chain requirements, for this fully integrated welding and NDT system will be characterised and addressed and consequently comprehensive knowledge and capability to meet the supply chain need will be developed alongside the physical asset designs. Successful completion of this project will provide a facility capable of improving welding efficiency for a wide range of products with various geometries and weld quality inspection requirements, for a range of steel structures in multiple sectors.

The project focusses on Enviromentally Friendly Transport within the Modern Built Environment. It will deliver a modelling and simulation tool to enhance safety and cost effectiveness of railway transportation through accurate understanding of in-service behaviour, component interaction and degradation. The lack of knowledge of in-service behaviour is a barrier to targetted innovation and is a reason for wasted research effort. The project deliverables will make a significant contribution to the design and manufacture of vehicles and the track system components. It further enhances the functionality and applicability of existing vehicle dynamics models by incorporating an accurate track system model. A much needed contribution will come form a scientifically robust model to assess the criticality of defects within the rail to enable knowledge based management of costly maintenance and rail renewal.

Tata Steel Speciality is the only UK manufacturer of high value speciality engineering steels for applications such as critical aerospace and the automotive market. Production is very energy intensive and via batch process, of which the analysis step contributes a significant amount to the batch time Each batch is usually different and for premium grades the control and reduction of impurities is critical. Automation and closed loop control of the process would offer significant productivity, energy reduction and sustainability benefits. While laser instruments, such as those designed and built by TDL Sensors Ltd, already enable accurate and fast measurements in the process industries, the challenge in the steel industry is the hostile environment, it is hot, dusty and under vacuum. Existing analysis instruments often use a sampling systems to reduce the temperature, dust load and any contaminants thus adding a time delay to measurement. This project seeks to develop, install and validate in situ laser based instrumentation to monitor in close proximity to the molten steel batch reactor and use this to close the control loop to significantly reduce the batch times. A second element is a feasibility study on the practicality of using a laser to accurately measure the molten steel temperature.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Train borne inspection of railway track has until recently been restricted to Ultrasonic or Electromagnetic testing and measurement, neither of which is capable of resolving shallow Rolling Contact Fatigue (RCF) cracks of a few mm long. Hence, these techniques are reactive to events & are not advanced enough to measure the key characteristics of RCF, i.e. shape, angle, length, linear density & position of crack initiation. They cannot be used to either enhance rail life or predict /prevent broken rails. It is this type of defect which was evidenced at Hatfield and is currently a subjective measurement resulting from manual visual inspection. This proposal details the development of an image acquisiton & analysis system enhanced by laser illumination & video imaging of the critical rail-wheel interface, in particular the contact band and the characterisation of visible rail head defects. This will be a preventative measure offering both safety and cost benefits. Image acquisition at high-speed, i.e. up to 125mph is a considerable challenge, requiring significant expertise. This is offered by the proposed consortium, along with ~8 years of rail defect data already obtained by Corus.