Numerical Evaluation of Impact Deformation Behavior of Railway Carbody in the Event of Level Crossing Accident

Abstract

The crash safety structure of railway vehicles is effective as one of the safety measures in the event of a collision accident. However there is no standard for crash safety in Japan. In order to ensure the crash safety, it is important to grasp the impact deformation behavior of the railway carbody in a collision accident. Therefore, we carried out Finite Element (FE) analyses of a level crossing accident with a dump-car under various conditions (collision position, collision angle and collision speed) and evaluated their results such as the contact force, the deformation energy of the rail vehicle, the deformation amount of the cabin, the maximum and mean deceleration of the passenger's area. The degree of correlation among these results was also discussed.