Experimental and numerical investigation of the design strategy of new anticollision posts for a typical railway vehicle

The forward design strategy and method for anticollision posts are of great importance to improve the crashworthiness of newly built railway vehicles to protect the survival space for drivers and passengers. This paper investigates the forward design strategy and method for anticollision posts from four aspects of theoretical calculation, structural design, numerical simulation, and experimental validation. The results show that the proposed forward design strategy and method for railway vehicle anticollision posts are effective and feasible. The proposed new types of anticollision posts have good elastic-plastic performance and could meet the requirements of ASME RT-2-2014 standard. The agreement between the test and simulation is reasonably good and the accuracy of the FE models is verified. The relative errors are 1.23%, -2.98% and -14.85% for the peak compression force of the posts and 7.94%, 4.48% and 4.17% for the longitudinal residual displacements at mid height of the posts.