Om Prakash Yadav

An early-career researcher in rail vehicle dynamics and railway asset management, I have recently concluded my postdoctoral research in the Rail Vehicles research group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. I earned my Ph.D. in 2022 from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India, where I focused on the dynamics of rail vehicle couplers.

Driven by strong ethical principles, I am dedicated to ensuring the safety of mechanical systems, both in their current form and as they evolve. As a researcher in the field of railways, my goal is to ensure that the dynamic behavior of rail vehicles is gentle on passengers and the rail infrastructure, and of course to guarantee that the rail infrastructure provides a smooth and safe platform for the vehicles.

Most of my research focuses on multi-body dynamics and rail-wheel interaction. Additionally, I have expertise in finite element analysis, artificial intelligence, the structural application of functional materials, and automation, skills I developed through collaboration with various master's and Ph.D. students in their research projects. I have also enjoyed working as a freelance consultant on railway couplers and disc brake design and manufacturing, before joining as postdoc.

As a postdoctoral researcher, I worked on subtasks for two EU Rail projects: IAM4RAIL (Holistic and Integrated Asset Management for Europe’s RAIL System) and TRANS4M-R (Transforming Europe’s Rail Freight). Under IAM4RAIL, KTH's subtask, "Wheel-rail forces and rail damage," focuses on addressing wear and rolling contact fatigue (RCF) issues on rails to extend their lifespan and ensure the safe operation of heavy haul trains. For the TRANS4M-R project, our subtask, "LTD tolerable forces simulation framework," involves implementing digital automatic couplers (DAC) in existing standard European freight wagons and developing a simulation framework to estimate longitudinal compressive forces and to assess the tolerable compressive forces of wagons to ensure the applicability of DAC and to redefine the acceptance criteria. I also worked on a CRRC Changchun Germany RailTech GmbH sponsored project titled "Dynamic behaviour of a low-floor tram: Comfort assessment". In this project we developed an enhanced model incorporating rooftop equipment, traction systems, and flexible carbodies, enabling the identification of key contributors to the observed vibration levels. Optimized the connection parameters for the rooftop equipment and traction units to improve passenger comfort, with robustness to parameter degradation as optimization objective.

Current publications:

1. Influence of wheel hollowness and gauge widening on wheel--rail interaction and damage in heavy-haul operations
2. A contribution towards predictive maintenance for extending rail life on a mixed traffic line
3. Effects of Gauge Widening and Wheel Wear onLow Rail Surface Damage of Heavy Haul Line

Preprints:

1. Evolution of Rolling Contact Fatigue Risk in Rails Under In-Service Degraded Wheel–Rail Profiles in Heavy-Haul Operation
2. A multibody simulation-informed neural network model for estimating rail surface damage indicators from measured wheel--rail profiles