Professor Tong Sun OBE, Imperial College London

This research is designed to address future rail transportation needs through extensive research on a set of new rail electrification systems, equipped to respond to the short, medium and long-term development strategy respectively of the industrial sponsor, Faiveley Brecknell Willis (FBW), a UK-based world-leader in electrification systems. Here the familiar contact approach, using a conductor either suspended in the air (pantograph) or mounted to the ground for supplying electricity to a vehicle, has been widely used but is not necessarily the optimum to all, coupled with its high installation and maintenance costs - thus a contactless option is required as an alternative. The core of this research is thus to develop three representative electrification systems, i.e. contact, hybrid and contactless, meeting the diverse demand from the public transportation. The key innovation of this research lies in integration of innovative, tailored optical fibre sensors into the energy sources and energy loads for remote monitoring and control to facilitate efficient energy management without comprising on safety.

The major expected outcomes will be three distinctive demonstrator systems: (i) a self-sensing pantograph network to be established to provide real-time information of the rail electrification system and to inform maintenance; (ii) a scaled-down vehicle model which is powered by a smart hybrid electrification system coupled with energy optimization; (iii) a scaled-down contactless vehicle model, powered by optimized smart batteries and driven by smart motors, using an integrated energy management strategy.