Lightweight design of K-EMU railway axle

초록

Railway axle is one of the important components of railway vehicle system. It has been reported that lightweight design of railway wheelset(unsprung mass) of railway vehicle can be achieved fine noise, vibration and drive performance. Hollow axle design is one of the general methods to reduce the weight of railway axle. However, conventional hollow railway axles have same bore diameter over the whole axial position. In this research, new type hollow axle design method which is adopted different bore diameter between axle body and journal bearing seat position is studied. The purpose of present study is to establish and evaluate the new design of railway hollow axle. To investigate the optimized geometrical bore shape, parametric study is carried out, and it is evaluated by both linear static and fatigue analysis with the commercial FEM(Finite Element Method) code according to the European Norms of railway axle design method(EN 13103). By this research, it is expected that the weight saving can be achieved up to 25% than conventional K-EMU(Korean Electric Multiple Unit) solid axle