Research Partnerships and Collaborations

The Centre for Doctoral Training in Integrated Tribology

The iT-CDT is a training and research centre for PhD students. The Centre is funded by the EPSRC and a range of industrial partners and runs jointly between the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds. There is a cohort of 12 students per year and a team of academic and industrial partners. The Centre brings the brightest postgraduate research engineers, academic staff, technical experts and industrial partners together in a unique world-leading research environment. Their aim is to tackle the challenging problems that face industry today, and develop new technologies and skills to benefit all partners. Our PhD projects cover a wide range of themes such as wind energy, automotive engineering, aerospace, bio-tribology, numerical modelling, surface engineering, advanced fluid mechanics, contact mechanics and many more.

CDT in Integrated Tribology

Friction: the Tribology Enigma

The Friction Enigma is an EPSRC Programme Grant joint between the universities of Sheffield and Leeds. Friction plays a central role in life; in transport, in manufacturing, in process engineering, in medical devices and in everyday human activities yet we still struggle to predict friction in realistic engineering contacts. Understanding the physical and chemical processes at contacting interfaces is the only route to cracking the tribological enigma.
The vision of this Programme Grant is to develop a framework to facilitate the prediction of friction. Through four challenges we aim to make progress in the prediction of friction using advanced cross-cutting methodologies - advanced microscopy, synchrotron techniques, sensor technologies and advancing modelling frameworks.

Friction: The Tribology Enigma

ORE Catapult Power Train Research Hub

A five year £2.5M research collaboration between the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult and Researchers in the Leonardo Centre to create the Powertrain Research Hub. The Leonardo Centre is collaborating with staff in the Department Electrical and Electronic Engineering and ORE Catapult to create the Powertrain Research Hub. The overarching objective of the Powertrain Research Hub is to support and fund the research and development of future technologies for the anticipated larger turbines and to research in depth potential solutions that improve turbine reliability, availability and minimise human interventions throughout the lifecycle of the asset. The activity is focussed in three areas; reliability improvement and advanced test methodology; advanced health condition monitoring and prognostic technologies; development of next generation powertrain components for larger sized wind turbines. We currently have projects on; wind turbine bearing lubrication monitoring, modelling of pitch bearing performance, sensors for tilting pad bearings, monitoring of bolt tightness, and dynamic load variation in main bearings.

ORE Catapult Powertrain Research Hub Press Release

The UK Acoustics Network

We are members of the UK Acoustics Network with Prof Dwyer-Joyce acting as leader of the Special Interest Group in Sensors (SIGSense). UKAN is an EPSRC funded network that brings together the internationally leading, but disparate UK acoustics, research community, to promote acoustics in the UK both nationally and internationally and to provide a coherent single point of access to acoustics research for industry and governmental agencies. The Leonardo Centre's work on Tribo-Acoustic sensing benefits from being associated with UKAN.

The main aim of acoustics.ac.uk is to bring together researchers working in different areas of acoustics to enhance communication between groups, provide a focus for collaboration and innovation, and to maximise the future impact of acoustics based research in the UK.

The UK Acoustics Network

Rail Innovation and Technology Centre

Network Rail and the University of Sheffield have entered into a five year agreement for collaborative research to stimulate "vitality in railway infrastructure engineering through investment in innovation and new technology". The focus of the RITC's activity is intelligent systems engineering involving detection, sensing, communication, materials, structures and software technologies that can be applied to rail infrastructure, operations and traffic such as; the track (materials, installation, monitoring, maintenance, design, and performance), associated vehicles (trains and their operation)
other plant (e.g. signalling, communications, information management).

Rail Innovation and Technology Centre