(29/06/2012)  In the Doctoral Thesis category, the first award-winner, “Ballast behaviour under traffic and tamping process” by Chiara Paderno, an engineering student at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (Switzerland), analyses the degradation of ballast due to the tamping process and railway traffic and evaluates the efficiency of the tamping process according to the condition of the ballast and the rigidity of the infrastructure.

The second Comsa Emte Railway Award-winning PhD thesis, “Modelling and prediction of dynamic behaviour of very high speed railway infrastructures” by Patricia Ferreira, an engineering student at the Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal), aims to evaluate the influence of running at high speed on the vibrations produced in the track.

Dissertations

In the Dissertation category, the jury gave one of the awards to Fernando Romero, a Polytechnic University of Catalonia student whose “Analysis of a track with box sleepers” compares the behaviour of a track with conventional sleepers with that of a track with box sleepers.

The other award-winning dissertation, “Ballast track – slab track transition” by fellow UPC student Miquel Bergadà, analyses the subsidences that occur on the surface of the rail and the stresses on the track formation in the areas of transition, in order to improve the hotspots.

Railway Award

The Comsa Emte Railway Awards are worth 5,000 Euros in the Doctoral Thesis category and 1,500 Euros in the Dissertation category, and they form part of the Aula Comsa Emte project, an initiative which has been carried out since 2000 in collaboration with the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and whose purpose is to promote research activities, technology transfer and science-technology dissemination in the field of railway infrastructure and superstructure.

In 2004, the call for entries was extended to European faculties of engineering, and since 2011, theses and dissertations can be submitted from any university in the world.