Carbody structures for railway coaches are hightly developed. There is an ongoing need to further improve the balance of weight, cost, and structural behaviour in order to meet the growing requirements regarding price, speed, and the feasibility of installing or integrating new onboard equipment. Taking a railway coach as an example, this paper details the requirements profile and describes various state-of-the-art carbody structures by focusing on the materials used and the design priciples implemented. A discussion follows about room for further improvement in terms of light weight. Because a lightweight design approach does not offer enough potential for significant weight or cost-saving, a survey of the material groups available is carried out by using material property selection charts to identify promising material groups. Ceramics and engineering composites offer higher structural performance at less weight. Further investigations focus on engineering composites only because of their assumed practicability for large structural parts for railway applications. To get an understanding of the cost side, the manufacturing processes applicable for composite structures of this size are reflected and summarised. Based on the results of this survey, a new design principle is developed and described. This new design principle is then reflected on the requirements profile mentionend above. Since the fire behaviour of composites structures is one of the most questioned properties, a new approach using intumescent material is introduced. Additionally, peculiarities of the design process for large composite structures are discussed. Furthermore, solutions for the introduction of loads into the structure are developed. Assuming similar structural properties and costs, the weight-saving potential of a carbody structure for a coach using the presented design principle is about 15 %, whereas this figure already includes additional weight to compensate for the different properties compared to metallic structures. The feasibility of aspects of the design principle developed, such as designing, manufacturing, and testing, was proven on a demonstrator part.
Developing large structural parts for railway application using a fibre reinforced polymer design
Entwicklung großer, tragender Bauteile für Schienenfahrzeuge unter Verwendung von Konstruktionen mit faserverstärkten Kunststoffen
Schriftenreihe Kunststoff-Forschung. TU Berlin ; 61 ; 1-151
2004
151 Seiten, 52 Bilder, 19 Tabellen, 60 Quellen
Hochschulschrift
Englisch
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