Development of Simulator to Accurately Reproduce Snow Accretion Phenomenon for Railway Vehicles Traveling in Snowy Areas

Abstract

When accreted snow drops off train bogies, it can damage railway ground facilities along tracks, train devices, etc. As a countermeasure against such snow accretion damage, we have developed a snow accretion analysis method to understand the snow accretion process. The "snow accretion analysis method" developed in this research consists of an "airflow calculation," a "trajectory calculation" and a "snow accretion calculation." In this research, we performed two kinds of snowfall wind tunnels to validate the proposed simulator.