Daniel Herbert Woodhead

Background

About Daniel Herbert Woodhead

A first class graduate and associate member of the IMechE, who has received a prize for the best final year project on the 2020 BEng course at the University of Huddersfield. Currently in the last few months of an EPSRC funded PhD write up year entitled 'Establishing the Principles of Compositional Design for Long Life Rail Steels'. Successfully published two journal articles in the Fields journal. Presently I am in the role of Research Assistant at the Institute of Railway Research. Throughout my undergraduate degree, placement year and PhD I have gained a wide variety of skills within the field of Engineering. My focus in recent years has been in scaled railway testing and metallurgical, mechanical and compositional analysis of railway steels. The aim of my PhD has been in finding which properties beneficially impact railway damage, such as wear and rolling contact fatigue. This objective has guided me into learning many techniques for characterising steels, including XRF, XRD, SEM, optical microscopy, hardness testing, tensile testing and twin disc testing. Twin disc testing helped me learn about railway contact mechanics, scaling methods and damage mechanism prediction models such as: The Whole Life Rail Model, T-Gamma, Archard's wear model and Shakedown theory. My PhD has given me the opportunity to explore the dynamics of rail vehicles, as well as the metallurgical properties of the rails and wheels under specific conditions.