Rail Equipment Crashworthiness Research
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Development of Crash Energy Management Designs for Existing Passenger Rail Vehicles
As part of the design development procedure used to develop a crash energy management coach car crush zone, the following steps are followed: conduct a detailed review of current state-of-the-art designs in use around the world, draft the design, conduct a series of tests on full-scale sub-assemblies, and then modify or finalize the design based upon the results from the tests. An example of one full-scale sub-assembly test is shown in this video. The test was performed at a drop tower facility where the impacting mass was dropped from various heights to obtain defined impact energies. This test was conducted to develop information about the performance of the fixed/sliding sill shear bolt arrangement for triggering the push-back sliding sill into the fixed sill. Several views from a high speed camera show the progression of shear bolt failure and appropriate sliding sill push-back into the fixed sill.
w droptower test video:
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View text description of video.
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