SUP&R ITN outreach magazine SUP&R ITN features in FIRM magazine - Jun2014 | Page 9

TRA2014

TWO FEHRL MEMBERS WIN EU
CHAMPIONS OF TRANSPORT
RESEARCH COMPETITION

From left to right: Dr Astrid Linder receiving her award, all the winners
together and Prof. Eugene O'Brien receiving his award.

This first EU Champions of Transport Research Competition was an excellence award for leading surface transport researchers in European projects which have proven impacts in the field. In the first stage, candidates
applied through the TRA Visions website, showing how their research was
impactful. Entrants were initially reviewed by a judging panel, followed by
a shortlisting workshop held in Brussels.

OVERALL WINNER AND

bridges and would have the positive benefits of reducing the cost of transport,
reducing the fuel consumption per tonne
of freight and reducing cumulative damage to road pavements.

WINNER OF ROAD
Dr Astrid Linder of VTI, Sweden, was
the Winner of the Road category as
well as the Overall Winner of the competition. She won thanks to the EvaRID
(Eva female, RID - Rear Impact Dummy),
the world's first virtual crash test
dummy representing an average
female, developed in the ADSEAT project (www.adseat.eu) and already commercially available.
A joint effort between the partners in
combination with funding received from
the European Commission made it possible for Astrid and her team to establish
opportunities for the development of
future vehicle safety systems that are
suitable for assessing male and female
risk alike. EvaRID, as well as the prototype hardware model, in need of further
development, symbolises a unique initial
step in the direction towards gender
equality in vehicle safety. These models
have been used as research tools in conjunction with the current low severity
rear impact model of an average male,
BioRID, when assessing the safety performance of car seats. Research results
achieved show how vehicle safety
assessment can be improved and thus
reduce the risk of soft tissue neck injuries in the future.

CROSS-MODAL AWARD
Professor Eugene O'Brien of UCD, Ireland, won the cross-modal award. Over
the course of several EU funded projects, Eugene’s research has resulted in
infrastructures that have been made
more sustainable by extending their
lives through the quantification of risks,
especially the risk of bridges being overloaded. This research has developed
road pavement and railway track deterioration models that can be used to predict the remaining service life of these
infrastructures.
In Ireland, Eugene’s work on Weigh-inMotion has resulted in an increase in the
allowable gross weight of 6-axle trucks
from 44 to 46 tonnes. His company demonstrated that the increase would have
little effect on the risk of overload on

At European and world level, his research
on bridge traffic loading is identifying the
nature of vehicles that govern the safety
of bridges - these findings have made it
possible to keep many bridges in these
countries in service for much longer. The
result is a bridge stock with a longer average bridge life, reducing the carbon footprint of bridges and reducing the demand
for non-renewable materials.
The winner for rail was Eckehard Schneider of the Universität Braunschweig
for his trans-European approach to rail
research and for waterborne the winner
was Apostolos Pananikolaou of the
National Technical University of Athens
(NTUA) for his Ship Design Laboratory.

For more information, contact George
Smyrnakis at george.smyrnakis@
newcastle.ac.uk, look up TRA Visions on
Facebook or see www.travisions.eu
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