 | Railway Engineer of the Year winner, Sakdirat Kaewunruen (left) , is... Railway Engineer of the Year winner, Sakdirat Kaewunruen (left) , is pictured with Dr Alex Remennikov who helped supervise his PhD research |
It’s two in a row for UOW as PhD graduate named Young Railway Engineer of the Year 2008
7 Apr 2008 | Bernie Goldie
Sakdirat Kaewunruen, a recent PhD graduate from UOW’s School of Civil, Mining and Environmental Engineering, has been awarded ‘2008 Young Railway Engineer of the Year’.
This is the second year in a row that UOW has won this award following on the success of Dr Behzad Fatahi in 2007 who was also from the School of Civil, Mining and Environmental Engineering.
The award, granted by the Railway Technical Society of Australasia (RTSA), rewards young professional engineers, technologists or associates in Australia and New Zealand who are under 30 and have reached a demonstrated level of achievement and involvement in the field of railway engineering.
Sakdirat was nominated for the prestigious award based on his outstanding combination between research and professional work experience.
At UOW, he had been working to develop a new design concept for railway concrete sleepers, under the supervision of Dr Alex Remennikov from the School of Civil, Mining and Environmental Engineering.
The research was part of a larger project under the Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) for Railway Engineering. In fact, both Dr Behzad Fatahi and now Dr Sakdirat Kaewunruen were both CRC-Railway Engineering sponsored students.
Dr Kaewunruen said his research involves extensive experimental and numerical studies that integrate multidisciplinary sciences including civil/structural engineering, impact engineering, reliability and risk engineering as well as computational methods.
Dr Kaewunruen’s contribution on new design concepts for concrete sleepers is being recognised by the Standards Australia committee CE/2 where it will incorporate some of his work in the upcoming AS1085.14 revision.
Since last year, Dr Kaewunruen has been working as the Design Engineer (principal) at Austrak Pty Ltd, a subsidised company of Laing O'Rourke (Australia) in Brisbane. With Austrak, he has been involved in a number of projects relating to railway permanent way including -- structural designs of prestressed concrete sleepers for new clients, track force measurements, inspections of railway tracks and bridges, analysis and design of road crossing panels.
In addition, he is currently supervising a final year engineering thesis for the University of Queensland, related to the dynamic load transfer mechanisms in ballasted railway tracks. This study is directed towards improving the design and manufacturing methods for sleepers and other railway track components.
Dr Kaewunruen was awarded the Peter Schmidth Memorial Scholarship for Best Performance in Engineering Postgraduate Research in 2006. He was also a first prize-winner at UOW's Higher Degree Research Student Conference in 2007 in the category "New Materials and Methods."
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