Evaluation method for crashworthiness of railway vehicles based on the correlation with the degree of passenger injury

Abstract

The crash safety structure of the railway vehicles is effective as one of the safety measures against the train crews and the passengers in the event of a collision accident. The standards for crashworthiness of railway vehicles are defined in Europe and the U.S., while there are no standards for crash safety in Japan. Therefore, it is important to establish the evaluation method for crashworthiness of railway vehicles considering the actual situation of collision accidents in Japan. The authors carried out finite element analyses of a level crossing accident under various conditions (collision speed, mass of the obstacle and relative position between the train and the obstacle) based on the statistical analysis of serious level-crossing accidents in the past in Japan, and calculated the deceleration time histories in the passenger area under each condition. We evaluated these deceleration waveforms according to European and the U.S. standards for crashworthiness, and we also performed finite element analyses of dummy’s behavior and injury values using these deceleration waveforms as input. We verified the correlation between the evaluation results in terms of the deceleration according to these standards and dummy’s injury values obtained by finite element analyses. As a result, the evaluation according to the velocity at which a passenger contacts the seat back ahead of him (the U.S. standards) was the most effective. Moreover, the integrated values of the deceleration of the passenger area during an integration time t₃₆₀ had the highest correlation with the dummy’s injury values.