Outstanding performance, innovative strength and the development of solutions for the world of tomorrow: this is the basis on which Siemens, in cooperation with technical universities and universities of applied sciences in Austria, presents the renowned Railway Engineering Award every two years for trend-setting master’s theses in the field of public transport on the subject of rail/rail.
For his master’s thesis on the “Integration of flexible bodies in multi-body systems”, a top-class jury of experts today honoured Georg Prinz, who conducts research in the field of rail systems at the VIRTUAL VEHICLE Research Center in Graz.

When creating multi-body simulation models (MBS models) in development projects, it is necessary to integrate simplified flexible bodies into the model. Until now, the creation of these flexible bodies was only possible using commercial finite element software (FEM software), which is often not available to the users of the MBS.

The toolbox developed in this project is based for the first time on freely usable software and ensures a previously unknown flexibility in scientific work. This makes it possible to use MBS models even without special knowledge of FEM and allows MBS developers to independently create flexible components and integrate them into the simulation. The toolbox created can be used in all areas and is not limited to the rail vehicle sector.

Picture (from the left): Diemo Wojik (Siemens Mobility, Head of Engineering), Mike Rabanser, Georg Prinz, Julian Torggler, Stefan Erlach (Siemens Mobility, Head of Bogies), Horst Bischof (TU Graz)