Tomos works on low-carbon steel routes and the coatings that keep infrastructure from becoming archaeology. He is fond of problems that smell faintly of a mill.
He collaborates with rail and civils teams who have a structure and a remaining-life question.
His work on circularity is refreshingly free of enthusiasm. Recycled content is constrained by contamination — copper, tin and the residual elements that arrive with mixed scrap — and beyond certain thresholds the metallurgy simply will not deliver the specified properties. He spends his time establishing where those thresholds actually sit for particular products, which is more useful than asserting that they can be wished away.
The coatings work is similarly practical: accelerated testing that states plainly what its acceleration assumes, and field exposure sites in South Wales that provide the corrective. He has a long-running and good-natured argument with several suppliers about the relationship between the two.
Selected projects
Named work, with a sentence of context each.
Residual element tolerance mapping
Established contamination thresholds for a structural product across a range of scrap blends, giving a producer defensible limits rather than a cautious guess.
Coating durability field correlation
Correlated eight years of coastal field exposure against three accelerated test regimes, and demonstrated that two of the three ranked the coatings in the wrong order.
Rail asset remaining-life assessment
Assessed corrosion and fatigue on a section of ageing structure using genuine service samples, supporting a deferred renewal with evidence rather than optimism.
Working with Evans
He asks for samples with a history: where they were, for how long, and in what condition. A sample without a provenance can be characterised, but it cannot be interpreted, and he is careful about the difference.
He is comfortable delivering results that are commercially unwelcome, and prefers to establish at the outset who will receive them and what happens next if they are disappointing.
Looking for
Asset owners with samples, histories, and an honest environment.
Probably not for
Marketing claims about recycled content that would prefer not to discuss residual elements.
Credits and contributions
- Operator of a long-running coastal exposure test site
- Adviser to a rail asset owner on corrosion and coating specification
- Contributor to a national steel decarbonisation evidence review