Introduction to the material substitution design method for the weight reduction of rolling stock carbody

철도차량차체 경량화를 위한 소재대체설계기술

This paper derived a theoretical method to estimate structural characteristics of carbody members when material substitution designs were performed, and verified the theoretical method with finite element analyses. For important factors in rolling stock design, such as bending stiffness, natural frequency, bending strength and buckling strength, some performance indices to estimate structural behaviors were developed in order to derive an equivalent design in spite of material substitutions. The developed method was used to reduce the weights of carbody components, as example problems, by substituting the aluminium alloy for the structural steel. The analysis results of the examples show that the proposed technique gives a reasonable initial guess in the case of a material substitution design.