Evaluation of effect of various collision conditions on safety of occupants in the event of level crossing accident

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. However there is no standard for crash safety in Japan. In order to discuss guidelines for the crash safety design of the vehicle structure, it is important to grasp the actual situation of collision accidents in Japan. Therefore, firstly the authors performed the statistical analysis of serious level-crossing accidents for the past 30 years. Secondly, we carried out finite element analyses of a level crossing accident with a dump-truck under various conditions (collision position, collision angle, collision speed and mass of the load on the dump-truck) based on the result of the statistical analysis. We also evaluated their results in terms of the contact force, the deformation energy of the rail vehicle, the deformation amount of the cabin, the mean deceleration of passenger’s area (conformable to European standard), the maximum deceleration of the passenger’s area and the secondary impact velocity of the passenger (American standard). The degree of correlation among these results was discussed. The analyses showed that the horizontal collision position of the dump-truck and the collision speed had a comparatively large effect on the safety of passengers, and further that the mass of the load on the dump-truck also affected it when the secondary impact velocity was used as an evaluation index.

Keywords

• railway
• finite element method
• level crossing accident
• vehicle strength
• occupant safety