Railway projects for civil engineering students

This article lists a series of railway projects intended as a response to civil engineering students’ inquiries about topics for their final degree projects.

Projects in civil engineering, regardless of their specialty, require a comprehensive approach involving many disciplines and must always be conceived with a keen eye on sustainability.

Railway infrastructure is part of a country’s Critical Infrastructure; railway projects represent a high-impact challenge in the efficient use of national resources, and their proposal has a positive effect on society, which finds a solution for its mobility, and on companies, which find a more efficient alternative for transporting their cargo.

From FerroTRACK, we strongly encourage all interested parties who wish to contribute to enriching the railway system.

Projects

Projects arise from the analysis of a stimulus that drives their creation. The stimulus is commonly associated with a problem (e.g., a truck colliding with a catenary), an opportunity for improvement/optimization, or business requirements (e.g., lowering the cost of sand transport for Vaca Muerta).

In this sense, we define a civil engineering project as the set of background information and procedures that go from gaining knowledge of a need that constitutes a problem or an opportunity, to obtaining an appropriate solution, which gives rise to the creation of a non-existent physical system necessary to respond to the need that originates it (TPIC, FIUBA).

From an academic approach, it is expected that in the development of the project, the interested student demonstrates an integral approach to a situation similar to professional practice or in the field of scientific-technological research and/or development in civil engineering. Likewise, it is expected that the student can incorporate knowledge and techniques in the different areas of study covered by the scope of the project. The proposal of the projects listed here responds to an analysis where a need in a real context is captured, and then the problem/opportunity is identified and formulated. The interested student must design solutions within the framework of existing restrictions and limitations, along with a selection of alternatives and selection criteria.

The proposed solution must have an integral dimension that covers technological (technical and construction), temporal, economic, financial, sustainability, environmental, and social aspects.

The development of the proposal must be aligned according to appropriate tools, evaluating the execution process, the preparation of documentation, the technical report, and complementary documentation, with professional standards.

The proposed projects do not necessarily have the scope of a professional work, and in some cases, an existing solution alternative may exist. The student must use available means to evaluate these alternatives and, if applicable, dismiss progress on that topic in time. Likewise, some projects, due to their specificity, may be the subject of a thesis.

The projects were classified using a proprietary criterion, separating those originating from the Oil & Gas productive circuit in Vaca Muerta, the Lithium corridor in the NOA region, and general projects of diverse origin. Discrete Systems are referred to as those resolved in a specific area of the layout, while Continuous Systems projects require an approach that covers a greater extension of the track and are feasible to carry out with several multidisciplinary work fronts.