Matt DeJong's project on aging railway infrastructure wins Rail Visionary award in UK

Featured Faculty: Matthew DeJong

A project on monitoring the health of aging railway infrastructure was awarded the New Civil Engineer TechFest Rail Visionary award in London, UK. The award recognizes organizations developing pioneering ideas and designs to effect major changes in the global rail sector.

The project, led by Professor Matt DeJong, is a collaboration between the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure (CSIC), AECOM, Network Rail, and the Alan Turing Institute (ATI)).

The project has 3 objectives:

  1. to improve understanding of structural behavior and degradation of bridges under train loading,
  2. to develop and evaluate a suite of new and existing monitoring technologies to monitor Network Rail assets, and
  3. to improve data availability and interpretation to enable better decision-making as part of a broader Network Rail initiative to digitize their infrastructure.

“We have been working on new solutions to monitor rail infrastructure for about 5 years and we are delighted to have won this award," said Matt DeJong.

"Congratulations to both Sam Cocking, PhD student, and Dr Haris Alexakis, Research Associate, for their excellent work on this project.

Thanks also to several researchers and students who laid the foundation for this project, including Sinan Acikgoz, Andrea Franza, Simon Ye, Robert Gayer, Rhiannon Evans and Ian Doughty.”

 

Close up of aging railway infrastructure

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