Drag reducing nose fairings for existing freight train locomotives

Abstract

At cruising speed, one of the most significant contributing factors to train fuel consumption is aerodynamic drag, and the leading locomotive experiences much more drag than any other car in the train. This work reports on the drag reduction that can be realized by the use of add-on nose fairings that are deployed on leading locomotives in a train set. Two types of fairing shapes were considered and all fairing walls are flat. It is anticipated that the fairing shapes would result from the deployment of easily stowed panels in an origami inspired manner. One of the fairing shapes has the appearance of a wedge and the other fairing is also wedge shaped, but with flow directing side wall features. For each general fairing shape, the important dimensions were parametrically varied in a systematic manner to identify the dimensions that yield maximum drag reduction. For the first shape, 45 different scenarios were considered; for the second shape, 15 were considered. A steady commercial computational fluid dynamic solver was employed to solve the flow field and locomotive drag for each of the scenarios. The best performing wedge-shaped fairing reduced the leading locomotive drag by nominally 14% and the best performing fairing shape with the side walls reduced the drag by 17%.