Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/ASME Joint Railroad Conference

John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (U.S.)

United States. Federal Railroad Administration. Office of Research and Development

JRC2008-63014

Proceedings

United States

NTL-RAIL TRANSPORTATION-Rail Safety ; NTL-SAFETY AND SECURITY-Vehicle Design ; NTL-SAFETY AND SECURITY-Rail Safety ;

This paper examines impacts to the side of railroad tank

cars by a ram car with a rigid indenter using dynamic,

nonlinear finite element analysis (FEA). Such impacts are

referred to as shell impacts. Here, nonlinear means elasticplastic

material behavior with large deformations. Several

computational issues are addressed. The dynamic response of

the shell structure coupled with the sloshing response of fluid

inside the tank is characterized through various mesh

formulations. Puncture of the tank is calculated using a

material failure criterion based on the general state of stress in

the shell structure in terms of stress triaxiality. The FEA

models were verified and validated in previous work. In the

present work, the verified and validated FEA framework is

applied to examine the effect of various factors on the

structural response of the tank. These factors include shell

thickness and indenter geometry.

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Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, Technical Reference Center
Federal Railroad Administration