Crushing analysis and multi-objective optimization of a railway vehicle driver's cab

Abstract

This paper presented the structure of a crashworthy railway vehicle driver's cab and its crashworthy performance was investigated by experiment and simulation. Based on the structural characteristics of railway vehicle, the driver's cab was divided into three parts: the first part consisted of four thin-walled square tubes with diaphragms, the second part consisted of a front baffle, a first level support structure, a first level draft sill and a first level longitudinal beam, the third part consisted of a second level support structure, a second level draft sill and a second level longitudinal beam. The quasi-static compression experiment showed that the driver's cab produced stable and ordered plastic deformation. Finite element simulation by LS-DYNA was used to simulate the deformation of the structure under quasi-static compression. Simulation results showed good agreement between experiment and simulation, the driver's cab absorbed 2321.13kJ energy in the quasi-static crushing load, the percent of the first part, the second part and the third part are 17.86%, 81.28%, 0.86%, respectively. Then based on the validated finite element model, a multi-objective optimization was applied to improve the crashworthiness of the driver's cab. It was found that the energy absorption (EA) increased with the increasing of crushing peak force (CPF), and the minimum EA and CPF in the design range were 4.311×103kJ, 7.609×103kN, respectively, the maximum EA and CPF in the design range were 6.380×103kJ, 15.720×103kN, respectively.