Zili Li has been appointed professor of Rail Systems & Monitoring at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences. Li will hold his inaugural speech at TU Delft on 27 September 2018.
Li focuses explicitly on validation and optimization of numerical models through experimental work on the railway track and in the laboratory. Here he makes use of, among other things, a special test set-up in the basement of the CEG faculty. With the so-called wheel-rail arrangement, Li can accelerate the wear of both the wheels of a train and the track itself - a week on the test track equals a year in the rail network.
Li was the founder of the Dr Track monitoring system for the quality of rails. Meanwhile, this technology has been further developed into a method to monitor the quality of rail contactlessly using a Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV).
What is special about Li's expertise is that he combines the physical phenomena and the necessary numerical methods (scientific theory and engineering). With this he connects the 2 worlds of wheel and rail. You can read more about Prof. Dr. Zili Li's work in this CEG Story of Science.
