It has become a valued tradition that the coveted VDEI Sponsorship Award is presented during the iaf opening ceremony. This prize is awarded to an outstanding piece of work by students or young engineers.

This year, the prize went to Dr Chongjie Kang for his doctoral thesis on "Verification of rail resistance considering track-support structure interaction". This work was assessed by the independent jurors with 17 out of 18 possible points each.

In his thesis, Kang dealt with an economically very important problem. With approx. 77,000 km of total rail length laid in Germany, it is noticeable that the focus is on the vehicles and the structures, but the highly stressed rail extensions as wearing parts in the track remain relatively unnoticed in research. The results of the research work have already been used in the planning of several large bridges, resulting in the elimination of rail extensions, which not only saved considerable financial resources in construction and maintenance, but also improved the computational durability of the track structure.