Development of a design for a crash energy management system for use in a railway passenger car

Abstract

A design approach for a crash energy management (CEM) system for a N13-type railway passenger car used by the Turkish State Railway Company is developed in this paper. The components of the CEM system are honeycomb-structured boxes, primary energy absorbers, shear bolts, a sliding sill mechanism and a fixed sill mechanism that are located in the passenger-free space at the end of the passenger car. In order to investigate the benefits provided by the CEM system, a full-scale railway passenger car collision with a rigid wall is simulated by using dynamic/explicit finite element (FE) methods. The crushing force, secondary impact velocity, acceleration and velocity curves, and deformation modes are computed to allow a comparison of the crashworthiness performance of a passenger car equipped with the proposed CEM system with that of a conventional passenger car. Comparisons of FE analysis results show that a passenger car incorporating the CEM system has a superior crashworthiness performance to that of the conventional passenger car. © 2014 Institution of Mechanical Engineers.