Abstract
The crashworthiness of a railway vehicle relates to its passive safety performance. Due to mesh distortion and difficulty in controlling the hourglass energy, conventional finite element methods face great challenges in crashworthiness simulation of large-scale complex railway vehicle models. Meshfree methods such as element-free Galerkin method offer an alternative approach to overcome those limitations but have proved time-consuming. In this article, a coupled finite element/meshfree method is proposed to study the crashworthiness of railway vehicles. A representative scenario, in which the leading vehicle of a high-speed train impacts to a rigid wall, is simulated with the coupled finite element/element-free Galerkin method in LS-DYNA. We have compared the conventional finite element method and the coupled finite element/element-free Galerkin method with the simulation results of different levels of discretization. Our work showed that coupled finite element/element-free Galerkin method is a suitable alternative of finite element method to handle the nonlinear deformation in full-size railway vehicle crashworthiness simulation. The coupled method can reduce the hourglass energy in finite element simulation, to produce robust simulation.
Highlights
With the increasing railway speed and traffic volumes, the crashworthiness performance of railway vehicles has become more important than ever to improve the passive safety of the vehicle in critical situation
We extend the application of the coupled FEM/meshfree method to the railway vehicle crashworthiness simulation
Care should be taken when increasing the mesh density in coupled FEM/EFGM so that it does not lead to unacceptable computation time
Summary
With the increasing railway speed and traffic volumes, the crashworthiness performance of railway vehicles has become more important than ever to improve the passive safety of the vehicle in critical situation. During the past two decades, different methods have been used to evaluate the crashworthiness performance of railway vehicles. FEMs have been proved to be effective to capture the nonlinear deformation[17] and widely used in rail vehicle crash simulation for many years, there still exist several challenges, such as numerical instability induced by mesh distortion and the requirements of complex pre-processing. Meshfree methods, such as EFGM, can address these challenges given its capability in dealing with large deformation and separation. It has not been used in solving large-scale complex structure crash simulation until recently, when an interface constraint coupling method has been developed and implemented into LS-DYNA version 971.15,16
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