Conformity Assessment on Body Structure of Railway Vehicle for Type Approval

초록

It was introduced that the railway safety management should be improved comprehensively so that fatal failures or accidents associated with railway vehicles can be reduced remarkably in Korea. In particular, it was brought up that the certification system for railway vehicles is necessary for reforming to meet the global standards or trends in order to ensure the safety of the railway and to strengthen the competitiveness of Korean railway industry. In the current certification system as manufacturing inspection and performance testing, the performance testing could not fulfill the prior verification for design conformity in the compliance with the safety criteria for railway vehicles because it can be just accomplished after producing the vehicles (or subassemblies or parts) and manufacturing inspections for them. Therefore, the current certification system in Korea cannot but have limitations to check the suitability of the design of the vehicles. The new certification system to solve the potential problems stated above and to reinforce railway safety in Korea has been amended on the railway safety act fundamentally in 2012, which prescribes type approval of vehicle design, manufacturer approval, and product verification for series production instead of manufacturing inspections and performance testing of railway vehicles. In this paper, it was proposed that the type approval consists of design examinations, conformity inspections and type tests of railway vehicles, which also showed the detail processes, procedures and methodology necessary for implementation of the new certification system. On the Basis of the suggestions, conformity assessment on body structure to get the type approval was presented to be useful to make the minister notices for the following-up measures, which were effective items and criteria of technical documents, drawings, conformity inspection, and type test for the design verification.