Aluminum Honeycomb Energy Absorber for High-Speed Train Nose

Abstract

Due to the tendency to increase the velocity of high-speed trains, concerns about their probable events have increased. Since train’s frontal nose is the first part of the train which is damaged at the frontal impact, specific attention should be paid to the design of this part. In this study an effort has been conducted to design a nose with light weight which can absorb maximum amount of energy that is possible when a frontal collision occurs. To this aim and with attention to aerodynamic considerations, application of aluminum honeycomb (HC) sandwich panel as an internal layer of train nose has been studied. This paper includes two main parts. The first part is dedicated to the simulation of aluminum HC sandwich panel with both shell and solid elements under dynamic crush loads. While the frontal collision of nose with different internal layer thicknesses of HC has been simulated in the second part and an optimum thickness has been proposed based on the generated results. It has been demonstrated that for all thicknesses amount of energy absorption has been increased at least 35%. Finite element method using LS-DYNA commercial package has been used for the numerical simulation. The results have been validated with available experimental results and acceptable agreement has been observed.