Methodical development of a lightweight car body for a high-speed train

Abstract

The reduction of the mass is one of the major keys in order to increase the energy efficiency of railway vehicles. As the car body represents by far the greatest per cent by weight of a single component of a railway vehicle a weight reduction of this vehicle offers a large potential to reduce an overall mass. Therefore, both in Japan and Europe greats efforts are made to develop systematic approaches to reduce the car body mass. This topic is in different peculiarities reflected by research conducted by the Railway Technical Research Institute (RTRI) of Japan and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). To complement each other works these two research institutions joined forces in order to develop a systematic approach to reduce the mass of car bodies, which is applicable both in Japan and Europe. The dimensioning and of a railway car body depends strongly on the applied load cases. These loads cases are defined in the correspondent standard. In Japan this standard is represented by the JIS E 7106, in Europe by the EN 12663-1. As there exist different standards in Japan and Europe the first step of the collaboration between RTRI and DLR was a comparison of the two standards. A first comparison showed that both standards are following the same basic approach. In both standards dynamics loads occurring during the whole life-cycle are represented by static equivalent loads. In the next step topology optimization, based on both standards were conducted. The results showed almost identic load paths, unless which standard has been applied. Based on this result it can be concluded that a systematic lightweight approach developed for JIS E7106 standard can also be used with the EN 12663-1 and vice versa.