A novel design method of the impact zone of a high-speed train

The design of vehicle impact zone is of great significance for passive safety protection of trains. This study introduces a novel design method of impact zone based on the concept of linear impact force, which has a linear increase of impact force with the increase of displacement. A three-dimensional dynamic model of train collision was constructed and validated. Here, the linear impact force slope of energy absorbing devices were selected as design variables, whereas the total mean acceleration along the train (TMA) and the total crash displacement (TS) were set as objectives. The multi-objective particle swarm optimisation was used to seek for an optimal design of the impact zone, where the response surface method was adopted to formulate the TMA and TS. The results indicate that the optimised design has smaller impact acceleration peak value, higher utilisation efficiency of compression stroke, and more uniform distribution of crashing displacement.