WIT Press


Modelling Blast Loads In Rail Vehicles

Price

Free (open access)

Volume

126

Pages

13

Page Range

85 - 97

Published

2012

Size

988 kb

Paper DOI

10.2495/SU120081

Copyright

WIT Press

Author(s)

T. Anthistle & D. I. Fletcher

Abstract

The open, accessible and crowded nature of urban mass transit networks has attracted previous attacks in London, Madrid and other cities, and it is very difficult to prevent an attacker entering while retaining normal operation of the system. The research presented here contributes to the modelling capability needed to apply a ‘passive safety’ approach in vehicle design, whereby the impact and consequences of a blast in a mass transit vehicle could be reduced. The multi-material Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (mm-ALE) approach with Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) is widely reported in the literature, but has been seen as requiring to fine a mesh to be applicable to large scale structures. Reductions in computing cost and improvements in the speed of finite element codes allows large ALE models to be solved, and mm-ALE approach is shown to be effective at predicting the effects of explosions. Also studied is the recently implemented 2D to 3D mapping function available in LS-Dyna, and comparisons are made with the standard 3D approach in terms of computational expense and solution accuracy. Keywords: ALE, FSI, finite element method, internal explosions, rail vehicles. Nomenclature p Pressure V Volume E Internal energy μ Volumetric parameter, 1 V − 1 D Damage paramter T ∗m Homologous temperature p Effective plastic strain ˙ ∗ Normalised strain rate

Keywords

ALE, FSI, finite element method, internal explosions, rail vehicles. Nomenclature p Pressure V Volume E Internal energy μ Volumetric parameter, 1 V − 1 D Damage paramter T ∗m Homologous temperature p Effective plastic strain ˙