1DThe crush behavior of stainless steel car bodies
  • Clarification of the crush behavior of components in stainless steel car bodies
  • Clarification of the deformation of car body ends when underframe overriding occurs
  •    The safety measures including crashworthiness of car bodies has become an important issue for railways because of a number of collisions involving stainless steel car bodies in recent years. To improve safety, therefore, the RTRI first investigated the problems related to it and analyzed the results of compressive crush tests performed on existing car body structures.
       To this end, the RTRI performed static crush tests on different stainless steel car body components while reviewing previous accidents (Fig. 1) and clarified the compressive load versus deformation characteristics of car body ends and the passenger cabins. The RTRI also implemented corresponding FEM analysis (Fig. 2) to crush tests, and verified the appropriateness of the analysis and improved it. This enabled the RTRI to reproduce the deformation behavior of the car body roof and the underframe center sill by performing crush tests to a high level of precision. When two train sets collide with each other, the car body underframe often overrides into the other car body at the intermediate end section. Assuming such a scenario, the RTRI performed a crush test on the car body superstructure excluding underframe structure, clarifying that the overriding phenomena causes larger deformation and lower compression load, comparing with the crushing behavior without overriding. Based on these findings, the RTRI plans further studies on the impacting behavior of rolling stock.
       This study was promoted with a subsidy from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.


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