Reduction of Weight in Railways by Composite Materials

The Composite materials can help the rail industry achieve valuable sustainability, performance and cost benefits. Lightweight, high performing and durable composites offer energy efficient solutions with lower environmental impact and reduced through-life costs for asset owners. Versatile pultruded composites enable the cost effective product ion of new design concepts for vehicle interior and exterior parts as well as a vast range of infrastructure applications. Growing populations, accelerating urbanization, resource scarcity and climate change are some of the critical challenges facing the world today. More sustainable mobility solutions will be essential to tackle these issues. The use of composite materials for rail cab applications has traditionally been driven by the need to produce a lightweight aerodynamic cab structure of complex geometry. This composite shell provides some protection to the cab and its occupant from very low energy projectile impacts. However, such structures provide little in the way of energy absorption in the event of higher energy impacts, such as vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-obstacle collisions. To produce a complete composite rail cab that meets crashworthiness requirements, there is a need to convert the cab structure into a structural energy absorbing component. To contribute to this, an energy absorbing primary crush zone (nose cone) has been designed.