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Rail Equipment Crashworthiness Research

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A Crush Zone Design for An Existing Passenger Rail Cab Car

This video shows observed and predicted behavior for two different train design strategies. There are three video clips.

The first video clip shows the observed behavior of a conventional cab car led train striking a standing locomotive led train. This full-scale test was conducted in Pueblo, Co at the Transportation Technology Center in January of 2002. The cab car led passenger train struck a standing locomotive led train of equal mass at 30 mph and experienced override with significant intrusion into occupied areas of the lead car. The car crushed approximately 22 feet.

The second video clip shows an overlay finite element result on top of the high-speed test footage. There is close agreement in the modes of crush at the colliding interface including override initiation and propagation. The results presented were the end product of a study to increase the fidelity of the colliding interface interactions modeling using deformable-to-deformable cab car and locomotive models.

The last video clip shows the results from a large deformation finite element model of the alternatively designed train using Crash Energy Management subjected to the same collision scenario. The Crash Energy Management design strategy incorporates crush zones at the ends of each car in the train to help dissipate the collision energy in a progressive and controlled manner. Each crush zone includes a push back coupler that allows the ends of cars to come together in a controlled fashion. This helps to reduce the likelihood of lateral buckling, a dangerous deformation mode exhibited by conventional designs. The crush zones also provide a means of absorbing significant collision energy. Crush is passed back from one interface to subsequent interfaces. The leading cab car includes additional features: a load transfer mechanism to control colliding interactions between dissimilar cars and a protected operator's survivable volume. For the 30 mph impact, all occupied space is predicted to be preserved.

View animation of analysis:
Small MPEG (8.47MB)
Large MPEG (20.9MB)
Windows Media (1.08MB)

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