A Study on the Safety Assessment of Car-Body Structure for Urban EMU

Abstract:

Engineering safety diagnosis of crashed subway electric multiple units (EMUs) was conducted for safety assessment. Several advanced engineering analysis techniques including nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques and stress and structural analyses programs, were performed for better understandings and exploration of failure analysis and safety concerns. Moreover, stress and structural analyses using commercial I-DEAS software provided important information on stress distribution and load transfer mechanisms as well as the amount of damages during the crash. One-dimensional crashworthiness was conducted to estimate the speed at the time of the accident by investigating the permanent deformation of the train. The estimated speed was used as the input value of a three-dimensional crashworthiness analysis. A good agreement has been found between structural analysis results and the results of actual damages in EMUs during crash. In this investigation, various advanced engineering analysis techniques for the safety analysis of subway EMUs have been introduced and the analysis results have been used to provide the critical information for the safety assessment of crashed EMUs.