2018 Volume 59 Issue 1 Pages 37-42
Recent years have seen an increase of the demand for safer, more comfortable railway vehicles. This goal is difficult to achieve with current methods given that some parts of the vehicle structure likely to have an impact during collision cannot be evaluated. Yet, it is indispensable to conduct analyses of the whole of the vehicle, in order to evaluate complex load paths along the whole length of the vehicle body. As such, a structural optimization approach based on FEM analysis was developed to establish a rational car body design method. Zooming in on areas selected during the whole-body structure analysis was used as a basis to build an optimization analysis algorithm. Structural optimization using this algorithm was applied to confirm that this method can be used to reduce the mass and improve the rigidity of railway vehicle car body structures.
