Abstract
In case where a train travels on the snow covered tracks, snow accretes to train bogies and grows up. When the accreted snow drops off the train bogies, it might damage the railway ground facilities along the tracks, the train devices, etc. To establish countermeasures against such snow accretion damage, we have developed a snow accretion analysis method in order to understand the snow accretion process. The “snow accretion analysis method” developed by this research consists of an “airflow calculation”，a “trajectory calculation” and a “snow accretion calculation”．In the snow accretion analysis method, airflow velocity is obtained by the airflow calculation, trajectory of flying snow is calculated by the equation of motion for gravity and drag using the airflow velocity, snow accretion determination for objects is performed by the snow accretion calculation. When a certain amount of snow accretes to the objects, the accretion shape was suitably taken into consideration in the airflow calculation. We calculate again the airflow velocity using the updated accretion shape and the snow accretion growth using the updated airflow velocity. In this research, two kind of validations are performed using a snowfall wind tunnel. First, a snow accretion analysis on a cubic model is performed, and it was confirmed that the snow accretion analysis reproduces the snow accretion experiment with a relative error of 6%. Next, each snow accretion analyses on two railway car-body models are performed, and it was confirmed that the snow accretion distributions were similar with the experiments. As this result, it became possible to consider places and causes where snow accretion occurs for the railway car-body models by the snow accretion analysis.
