The University of Sheffield
Department of Mechanical Engineering

Dr Rachel Tomlinson

BEng, PhD, CEng, FIMechE

Dr Rachel Tomlinson

Senior Lecturer

Director of Undergraduate Teaching

Department of Mechanical Engineering
The University of Sheffield
Mappin Street
Sheffield
S1 3JD

Telephone: +44 (0) 114 222 7757
Fax: +44 (0) 114 222 7890

email : r.a.tomlinson@sheffield.ac.uk

Profile

Rachel Tomlinson was awarded her PhD in Experimental Mechanics from the University of Sheffield in 1995 and graduated with a BEng degree in 1991 in Mechanical Engineering from the same institution. Her PhD was sponsored by British Aerospace Airbus Ltd and following this became a research associate in the Experimental Stress Analysis Laboratory at the University of Sheffield, working on projects supported by EPSRC ROPA, Airbus UK, Rolls Royce plc, SNECMA (Paris), and the Defence Research Agency. She has expertise in several areas of experimental mechanics including automated photoelasticity, thermoelasticity, caustics and fracture mechanics.
Rachel was appointed as a lecturer in 1998 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in January 2007.

Other professional achievements:

Research Areas

As part of the Experimental Mechanics Laboratory, current research projects are in the development and use of optical instruments to measure strain in a wide range of applications, such as particulate reinforced materials, automotive glass, and aircraft components.

Digital Image Correlation techniques are being used to study damage in particulate reinforced materials. A range of particulate toughened polymers are being studied: to investigate experimentally the deformation mechanisms around the particles; to identify and characterise the potential failure mechanisms through experiment; and to explore how these mechanisms can be modelled mathematically. The work is sponsored by Cytec Engineered Materials Ltd, who are global providers of technologically advanced composite materials for high performance aerospace and automotive applications.

Within safety critical industries, such as in aircraft manufacture, numerical analyses need to be verified by experiment. However both the cost of development tests and the time taken to perform them are considerably greater than the cost and time required to conduct Finite Element Analyses (FEA). Airbus are sponsoring research into the use of Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM) techniques to accurately produce scaled structural models for the aerospace industry with the aim of improving efficiency of design.

Asymmetric stress profiles through glass may be measured using magnetophotoelasticity. Pilkington plc are sponsoring research into developing a full-field magnetopolariscope system, which will enable more effective measurement of residual stress in glass. Non-destructive methods to measure stresses in three-dimensional photoelastic models of engineering components are being investigated. A joint research project with The University of Manchester is developing a new instrument using tomographic techniques, which will allow experimental verification of design prototypes to be performed quickly and efficiently.

Thermoelastic stress analysis techniques are being used in a number of different areas including exploring why a crack grows in the direction that it does, and investigating damage in polymers and elastomers used in the oilfield industry.

Other areas of interest are with birefringent fluids with applications in a wide variety of practical engineering problems, e.g. flow through micro-channels; unsteady flows; biological flows; and classic fluid dynamics problems, and using photoelasticity in medical and dental applications.

Research Projects

Teaching

MEC302 Integrity of Materials and Components

MEC405 Experimental Stress Analysis

Recent Publications