Professor David Fletcher
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Professor of Railway Engineering
- Profile
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Professor David Fletcher, BEng (Hons) PhD CEng IMechE, is a Professor of Railway Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He conducts a range of research with applications in the rail sector addressing the challenges of infrastructure, vehicle systems, energy supply, and station operation. He has worked with the rail sector since 1995 including a five-year period based on a railway depot to conduct large-scale experimental investigation. Since 2009 he has been at the University of Sheffield and leads a research group with industrially linked projects in materials, electrification energy supply and storage, overhead line dynamics, and utilisation of stations. Besides research, David leads teaching on the MEng/MSc modules MEC448 Railway Engineering and Sustainable Transport, and MEC442 Managing Innovation and Change in Engineering.
- Research interests
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- Rail
- Transport
- Electrification
- Energy storage
- Network modelling
- Projects
Projects
Overhead line electrification
David has led research on overhead line electrification since 2013. With PhD students and research associates his team has developed models for overhead line to
pantograph interaction. This has explored particularly the challenges of electrifying legacy infrastructure, for example, limited clearance tunnels for which standard wire layouts cannot be used. This work has been conducted with Network Rail, Furrer+Frey and RSSB across a series of related projects.EPSRC TransEnergy
As both road and rail transport coalesce on electricity rather than fossil fuels there are opportunities for a large increase in energy efficiency through the incorporation of line-side energy storage, and integrated road-to-rail energy exchange in the transport network. This project developed a model of rail energy utilisation including battery storage. This was wrapped within an optimisation to allow exploration of where storage can be most effectively sited and sized. The particular case of a public station car park with electric vehicles being integrated into the energy buffering and car charging system was explored.
Embedded carbon and engineering performance of materials
David has a long track record in the investigation of materials used in the rail sector (rail steels, overhead line components) from an engineering performance perspective. Most recently through EngD research with British Steel (student Jacob Whittle), this is being extended to better understand how embedded carbon can be quantified against the engineering performance obtained from the infrastructure. This aims to support decision-making on reducing embedded carbon in transport networks.