Evaluation method for crashworthiness of railway vehicles based on the correlation with the injury severity of passengers occupying longitudinal seats

Abstract

It is important to enhance the safety of the railway passengers on board in the event of a collision accident. The railway vehicle standard in European countries and the U.S. set the framework for structural crashworthiness design. On the other hand, an evaluation method for the crashworthiness design of railway vehicles has not been established yet in Japan. Our objective is to suggest the safety index for the railway vehicles in which longitudinal seats are arranged. The severity of passenger’s head injury was estimated in a level crossing accident scenario, including the horizontal collision position to a dump truck, the collision angle, the vertical collision position and the load weight of the dump truck by using numerical simulation. The correlation between the severity of injury of an Anthropomorphic Test Device (ATD) model and the safety index, integral of deceleration waveforms, mean deceleration waveforms and maximum waveforms which occurs on the railway vehicles at the time of collision with a dump truck were verified. It was found that the integral of deceleration values during an integration time t_imp had the highest correlation with the injury values of ATD. We suggested the integral of deceleration and the critical values of the second-furthest away from the bench-end partition as an evaluation method for the crashworthiness design of railway vehicles.