Dr Kate Tomlinson is a Lecturer in Tribology in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is a member of the Leonardo Centre for Tribology and the Rail Innovation and Technology Centre at the University of Sheffield.

Kate became a lecturer in the department in 2023, prior to that she was a Senior Lecturer in Railway Engineering Management at Sheffield Hallam University. She graduated from the University of Derby with a BSc in Mathematics (1st class) in 2017, before moving to the University of Sheffield to obtain her PhD in Mechanical Engineering.

Kate’s PhD was sponsored by Network Rail and concerned the life extension of railway track components through additive manufacturing. She has since worked as a Research Associate in broader areas of Tribology, focusing on friction and biotribology.

Kate’s research crosses many of the aspects of tribology (friction, wear, and lubrication) and is predominantly focused on the railway sector. Her work aims to improve the environmental impact of rail travel through the understanding of rail-wheel contact, the characterisation of new materials and the development of new maintenance techniques. One of her research themes is the study of wear particles generated through rail-wheel contact and the impact this has on air quality in underground railways. Through her experience in biotribology she can further consider the frictional effects that issues like particulate matter have on the human body.

Research interests

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.