Simulation of child passenger collision in the rail vehicle interior

Abstract

Passive safety of rail vehicles is described by two documents. These requirements for structural crashworthiness are covered by EN 15227 standard. The GMRT 2100 standard (currently mandatory in UK) summarizes the requirements for interior safety. The actual legislation deals only with an injury of an average adult male (50 percentile). An assessment of interior passive safety for the wider population (5 and 95 percentile) will be other logical steps (in the near future). This approach is well known from automotive industry. This study identifies the most dangerous factors for child passenger collisions in the interior of a rail vehicle. Virtual simulations, finite element method and multibody simulations are used for that. It is possible to overtake the current trends and to carry out a rail interior safety assessment for children due to the excellent scalability of the VIRTHUMAN model. The data of the vehicle design were obtained from the local producers. The vehicles which are used in this research were developed recently and they are generally used. The injury criteria are used for probability of injury evaluation. Some first recommendations for rail interior design safe for children are provided at the end of this paper.