CONTACT Software and Siemens Austria are the industry partners in a research project aimed at speeding up the development of bogies for railroad vehicles. The Virtual Vehicle Research Center (ViF) and the Institute of Electrical Engineering at the Graz University of Technology are providing scientific support.
The project is sponsored by the Austrian Federal government as part of the COMET K2 program. The project partners will be presenting initial findings at the 13th International Railway Industry Conference to be held 26-28 February 2014 in Dresden.
Railroad trucks are designed to have a service life of thirty years and are crucial to both the safety and comfort of rail vehicles. Under the name "Multidisciplinary Optimization in the Development of Bogies", the joint project sets out to provide suitable methods for increasing the level of automation when using numeric calculation procedures. Up to now, it has been necessary to condition the required CAD model in a time-consuming manual process in order to optimize the projected behavior of the running gear structures with regard to strength, noise and other parameters using computer simulations.
With CONTACT's Fast Concept Modelling (FCM), a concept tool that permits the simple, rapid development of parametric geometrical models and the automatic export of FE models for crash, NVH and static analyses is now being tested using. After the models have been successfully optimized, the design process can be completed on the CAD system. The Siemens Group, which has the world's largest development and production plant for railroad trucks in Graz, has provided the reference example for the joint project. This plant produces up to 3,000 trucks a year for short-haul and high-speed trains across the world.
Since the inception of the Virtual Vehicle Research Center, the Rail division has been a cornerstone of the center's research activities and has long been investigating the use of numerical optimization methods to evaluate and improve entire digital systems. Together with the Institute of Electrical Engineering at the Graz University of Technology, the ViF is bringing expertise and the underlying methodologies to the project to ensure that the findings can be used effectively in product development.
