KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Acronym: KTH E-mail: stichel@kth.se
Telephone: +46 8 790 60 00
Address: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
KTH Railway Group is a multidisciplinary centre for research and education with more than 25 years of experience. It consists of ten research groups , each of them representing one or more disciplines which together, in principle, cover all competencies in the railway area.
The purpose of KTH Railway Group is to contribute to the development and increased competitiveness of the railways and the Swedish rail industry by providing expertise in rail-related topic
This unique organization is able to carry out major research programmes with a broad approach in collaboration with our partners, covering not only technical aspects but also commercial ones, e.g. market analysis.
The Railway Group is very international. We have been involved in about 10 Shift2Rail projects where we worked together with basically all European stakeholders as vehicle suppliers, infrastructure owners, operators, universities and consulting companies. The amount of scientific exchange with partner universities in Europe, USA, China, India, Australia, Thailand and Indonesia is continuously increasing.
The KTH Railway Group is also very active in Railway education. We teach railway students in mechanical, civil and electrical engineering. We have a two-year master program in Vehicle Engineering (Road and Railway), which is fully taught in English. In fall 2018 a new master program in Railway Engineering in cooperation with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) started. Students enrolled at KTH spend one term at UIUC and vice versa. The railway group is regularly arranging training courses for engineers in industry and railway operators/infrastructure managers.
- Rail Vehicles
- The Marcus Wallenberg Laboratory for Sound and Vibration Research
- Lightweight Structures
- Transport Planning
- Structural Engineering and Bridges
- Soil and Rock Mechanics
- Electrical Energy Conversion
- Information Science and Engineering
- Network and Systems Engineering
- Railway transport
- Railway infrastructure
- Operation of railways
- Railways strategy
- Freight railways
- Logistics
- Economics
- Container transport
- Railway dynamics incl. aerodynamics
Professor Sebastian Stichel, in Rail Vehicle Dynamics at KTH since 2010. Director of the KTH Railway Group since 2011 and Deputy Head of the Department of Engineering Mechanics since 2020.
- Board member SWEDTRAIN – Swedish Association of Railway Industries – since 2019.
- Vice-Chair Academia of the European Rail Research Advisory Council (ERRAC) since 2017.
- Head of Department of Aeronautical and Vehicle Engineering from 2017 to 2019.
- Chairman of the Shift2Rail Scientific Committee from 2016 to 2018.
- Adjunct Professor at Beijing Jiaotong University since 2017.
- Member of the International Advisory Board of the National International Science and Technology Cooperation base on Railway Vehicle Operation Engineering of BJTU.
- Associate Editor of Journal of Railway Engineering Sciences.
- Visiting Professor at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2013, at Southwest Jiaotong University in 2017 and 2019 and at Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee in 2019.
- Worked more than 10 years at Bombardier Transportation. From 2003 to 2010 Manager Vehicle Dynamics with responsibility in Sweden, Germany, UK and France.
- Master and PhD. degree in Vehicle Technology at Technische Universität Berlin. Supervisor Prof. Klaus Knothe.
- Current research interests are wheel and rail wear and rolling contact fatigue, freight vehicle dynamics, ride comfort and active suspension, dynamic pantograph-catenary interaction (cf. Rail Vehicle Research Group).
Publications: https://www.kth.se/profile/stichel/publications
A selection of projects, activities and papers:
- N. K. Mandal et al., „FEA of mechanical behaviour of insulated rail joints due to vertical cyclic wheel loadings,“ Engineering Failure Analysis, vol. 133, pp. 105966, 2022.
- A. SJ Smith et al., „Estimating the marginal maintenance cost of different vehicle types on rail infrastructure,“ Proceedings of the Institution of mechanical engineers. Part F, journal of rail and rapid transit, 2021.
- V. V. Krishna et al., „Rail RCF damage quantification and comparison for different damage models,“ Railway Engineering Science, 2021.
- R. Kulkarni et al., „Vehicle running instability detection algorithm (VRIDA): A signal based onboard diagnostic method for detecting hunting instability of rail vehicles,“ Proceedings of the Institution of mechanical engineers. Part F, journal of rail and rapid transit, pp. 095440972110205, 2021.
- A. Alonso et al., „Physical damage mechanisms for uniform wear calculation,“ in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Contact Mechanics and Wear of Rail/wheel Systems, CM 2018, 2018.
- S. Stichel et al., „Wear and RCF prediction based on improved contact mechanics modelling,“ in 11th International Conference on Contact Mechanics and Wear of Rail/Wheel Systems, CM 2018; Delft; Netherlands; 24-27 September 2018, 2018.
- Z. Liu, S. Stichel and M. Berg, „Overview of technology and development of maglev and hyperloop systems,“ , TRITA-SCI-RAP, 2022:001, 2022.
More publications etc. via link: https://www.kth.se/profile/stichel/publications