• Title/Summary/Keyword: Rail Safety

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Wetting-Induced Collapse in Fill Materials for Concrete Slab Track of High Speed Railway (고속철도 콘크리트궤도 흙쌓기재료의 Wetting Collapse에 관한 연구)

  • Lee, Sung-Jin;Lee, Il-Wha;Im, Eun-Sang;Shin, Dong-Hoon;Cho, Sung-Eun
    • Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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    • v.24 no.4
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    • pp.79-88
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    • 2008
  • Recently, the high speed railway comes into the spotlight as the important and convenient traffic infrastructure. In Korea, Kyung-Bu high speed train service began in bout 400 km section in 2004, and the Ho-Nam high speed railway will be constructed by 2017. The high speed train will run with a design maximum speed of 300-350 km/hr. Since the trains are operated at high speed, the differential settlement of subgrade under the rail is able to cause a fatal disaster. Therefore, the differential settlement of the embankment must be controlled with the greatest care. Furthermore, the characteristics and causes of settlements which occurred under construction and post-construction should be investigated. A considerable number of studies have been conducted on the settlement of the natural ground over the past several decades. But little attention has been given to the compression settlement of the embankment. The long-term settlement of compacted fills embankments is greatly influenced by the post-construction wetting. This is called 'hydro collapse' or 'wetting collapse'. In spite of little study for this wetting collapse problem, it has been recognized that the compressibility of compacted sands, gravels and rockfills exhibit low compressibility at low pressures, but there can be significant compression at high pressures due to grain crushing (Marachi et al. 1969, Nobari and Duncan 1972, Noorany et al. 1994, Houston et al. 1993, Wu 2004). The characteristics of compression of fill materials depend on a number of factors such as soil/rock type, as-compacted moisture, density, stress level and wetting condition. Because of the complexity of these factors, it is not easy to predict quantitatively the amount of compression without extensive tests. Therefore, in this research I carried out the wetting collapse tests, focusing on various soil/rock type, stress levels, wetting condition more closely.

Development of Collision Scenario-Based Evaluation System for the Cognitive Performance of Marine Officers (충돌시나리오 기반의 항해사 인지능력 평가시스템 개발)

  • Kim, Hong-Tae;Barentt, Mike;Yang, Won-Jae
    • Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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    • v.31 no.8
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    • pp.629-635
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    • 2007
  • Reduced crew performance is frequently cited as a major causal factor in maritime accident causation. Although considerable research has been conducted on the hours of work undertaken by seafarers through interviews and the analysis of records, experimental studies to observe the effects of factors such as high workload, shift patterns, stress, sleep deprivation and disturbance on the cognitive performance of mariners have been limited. Other safety-critical transport industries, such as aviation and rail, have developed fatigue management tools to help manage the work patterns of their operators. Such a tool for mariners would assist shipboard crew, marine pilots and shore management in planning and improving work schedules. The overall aim of this paper is to determine a fatigue factor, which can be applied to human performance data, as part of a software program that calculates total cognitive performance. This program enables us to establish the levels of cognitive performance of a group of marine pilots to test a decision-making task based on radar information. This paper addresses one of the factors that may contribute to the determination of various fatigue factors: the effect of different work patterns on the cognitive performance of a marine pilot.

The Site Installation Test of Single-Phase MJ81 Switch Point Machine Localization (단상 MJ81 전기선로전환기 국산품의 현장설치시험)

  • Baek, Jong-Hyen;Kim, Yong-Kyu
    • Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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    • v.10 no.12
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    • pp.3632-3637
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    • 2009
  • In this paper, we describe the performance results of the field installation test which is required to practicalize the single-phase MJ81 Switch Point Machine. This product has passed the certified test through performance improvement of driving parts in order to use 3 phase MJ81 Switch Point Machine, which is localized by taking over technology from Alstom and Cogifer when constructing Seoul-Busan rapid-transit railway, without change of the electrical equipment at track-side in domestic existing lines which single-phase 220V is used. KRRI and Samsung SDS have localized the single-phase MJ81 Switch Point Machine to improve the speed and safety of the conventional lines through the existing railway technology development project. For practicalization of this, we should, however, verify the performance through not only field installation test in real lines but also interface test with the interlocking. In this paper we verify the practicality of the domestic single-phase MJ81 Switch Point Machine through analysis on the performance result of the field installation test as well as the research contents for this test. Thereby, in Feb 2009 we have received an order from the Korea Rail Network Authority and are currently installing the single-phase MJ81 Switch Point Machine.

Analysis of Performance Tests and Friction Characteristics of a Friction Type Isolator Considering Train Load Conditions (열차 하중조건을 고려한 마찰형 방진장치 성능시험 및 마찰특성 분석)

  • Koh, Yong-Sung;Lee, Chan-Young;Ji, Yong-Soo;Kim, Jae-Wang
    • Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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    • v.18 no.3
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    • pp.694-702
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    • 2017
  • In the case of an elevated railway station, structure borne noise and vibration due to structural limitations allow the load and vibration from railway vehicles to be directly transmitted to the station structure, resulting in an increase in the number of civil complaints from customers and staff of the station. The floating slab track system, which is well known as one of the solutions for reducing the noise and vibration from elevated railway stations, usually contains rubber mounts or rubber pads under the railway slab which act as a damper. These types of device have the disadvantage that is difficult to predetermine the exact stiffness and damping ratio under the nonlinear loads resulting from train services. In this study, an isolator with a friction type of wedge is introduced, which can be applied to floating slab track systems and to be designed with precisely the required stiffness. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of the stiffness between the designed and experimental values is carried out, while the damping ratio, which is closely related to the friction wedge blocks, is deduced according to the train load condition. The performance tests of the isolator were conducted in accordance with the DIN 45673-7 standard which includes both static and dynamic load tests. The load conditions for the performance tests are designed to conform to the DIN standard related to the weight of the train and rail track, in order to perform vertical and horizontal load tests, so as to ensure the secure structural safety of the railway. Also, by checking the change aspect of the friction coefficients of the friction elements according to the loading rate, the vibration reduction performance of the friction type isolator with variable loading rate conditions is examined.

Reinforcement of Collapsed Railway Subgrade and Line Capacity Increase Using Short Reinforcement with Rigid Wall (짧은 보강재와 일체형 강성벽체를 활용한 철도 붕괴노반 보강 및 선로용량 증대 기술)

  • Kim, Dae-Sang
    • Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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    • v.17 no.11
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    • pp.604-609
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    • 2016
  • This study evaluated the long-term performance of RSR (Reinforced Subgrade for Railways) technology which increases the railway line capacity without the need for additional land. Its characteristics include the use of a short reinforcement with rigid wall, which make it possible to apply it in confined spaces. The 7m high and 40m long testbed employed to evaluate the long-term performance was designed and constructed near Jupo station on the Chang-hang line. This line, located close to a local bus route, had collapsed at the subgrade following heavy rainfall. The performance of the new type of subgrade was verified with long term measurements over a 2 year period including the surface and ground settlement, horizontal displacement of the wall, tensile strain of the reinforcement, and settlement of the rail top on the side track. Based on the results of the measurements made until now, we concluded that it had sufficient safety and serviceability for use as a railway subgrade. It is expected that RSR technology could be frequently used at sites which lack the necessary construction materials for an embankment and are located close to functional railway lines and boundaries, in order to settle civil complaints.

Feature Extraction for Bearing Prognostics based on Frequency Energy (베어링 잔존 수명 예측을 위한 주파수 에너지 기반 특징신호 추출)

  • Kim, Seokgoo;Choi, Joo-Ho;An, Dawn
    • The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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    • v.16 no.2
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    • pp.128-139
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    • 2017
  • Railway is one of the public transportation systems along with shipping and aviation. With the recent introduction of high speed train, its proportion is increasing rapidly, which results in the higher risk of catastrophic failures. The wheel bearing to support the train is one of the important components requiring higher reliability and safety in this aspect. Recently, many studies have been made under the name of prognostics and health management (PHM), for the purpose of fault diagnosis and failure prognosis of the bearing under operation. Among them, the most important step is to extract a feature that represents the fault status properly and is useful for accurate remaining life prediction. However, the conventional features have shown some limitations that make them less useful since they fluctuate over time even after the signal de-noising or do not show a distinct pattern of degradation which lack the monotonic trend over the cycles. In this study, a new method for feature extraction is proposed based on the observation of relative frequency energy shifting over the cycles, which is then converted into the feature using the information entropy. In order to demonstrate the method, traditional and new features are generated and compared using the bearing data named FEMTO which was provided by the FEMTO-ST institute for IEEE 2012 PHM Data Challenge competition.

3D Track Models Generation and Applications Based on LiDAR Data for Railway Route Management (철도노선관리에서의 LIDAR 데이터 기반의 3차원 궤적 모델 생성 및 적용)

  • Yeon, Sang-Ho;Lee, Young-Dae
    • Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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    • 2007.11a
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    • pp.1099-1104
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    • 2007
  • The visual implementation of 3-dimensional national environment is focused by the requirement and importance in the fields such as, national development plan, telecommunication facility deployment plan, railway construction, construction engineering, spatial city development, safety and disaster prevention engineering. The currently used DEM system using contour lines, which embodies national geographic information based on the 2-D digital maps and facility information has limitation in implementation in reproducing the 3-D spatial city. Moreover, this method often neglects the altitude of the rail way infrastructure which has narrow width and long length. There it is needed to apply laser measurement technique in the spatial target object to obtain accuracy. Currently, the LiDAR data which combines the laser measurement skill and GPS has been introduced to obtain high resolution accuracy in the altitude measurement. In this paper, we first investigate the LiDAR based researches in advanced foreign countries, then we propose data a generation scheme and an algorithm for the optimal manage and synthesis of railway facility system in our 3-D spatial terrain information. For this object, LiDAR based height data transformed to DEM, and the realtime unification of the vector via digital image mapping and raster via exactness evaluation is transformed to make it possible to trace the model of generated 3-dimensional railway model with long distance for 3D tract model generation.

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Evaluation of Resistance Spot Weldability of SGAFC1180 Steel (SGAFC1180 TRIP강재의 저항 점용접성 평가)

  • Shin, Seok-Woo;Lee, Jong-Hun;Kim, Dae-Hwan;Park, Sang-Heup
    • Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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    • v.18 no.12
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    • pp.644-649
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    • 2017
  • In the automobile industry, there is growing demand for lightweight vehicles due to environmental problems and rising oil prices. Therefore, aluminum alloys and special materials are being used to reduce the weight of vehicles, but there are still many difficulties to overcome in terms of cost and strength. Therefore, the application of advanced high strength steel (AHSS)is increasing. AHSS has good strength and formability.Safety regulations are becoming stricter, and 1.2-GPa super-high-strength steels are gradually being applied for the center pillar and roof rails. Thus, the application of different kinds of steels in automobile bodiesis also increasing gradually. This study evaluates the resistance point weldability and the characteristics of a welded part of SGAFC1180 1.2t steel. A simulation was used to observe the nugget formation and its growth behavior. The prediction performance showed a similar tendency within an error rate of 10%. Also, the effect of this behavior on the process resistance and dynamic resistance was investigated,along with the correlation between the shear tensile strength and nugget diameter.

Barrier Free Accessibility to Trains for All

  • Rentzsch, Manfred;Seliger, Denis;Meissner, Thomas;Wessner, Claudia
    • International Journal of Railway
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    • v.1 no.4
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    • pp.143-148
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    • 2008
  • This paper is the output of a collaborative European project concerning the barrier free accessibility for disabled persons to regional and long distance trains in Europe. Disabled people represent around 13% of the population in Europe. This is approximately 63 million people. The range of disabilities includes people with reduced mobility including wheel chair users, viewing and hearing impaired people and other forms of impairment. Improving accessibility aims at contributing to the provision of public transport services to all citizens in an equitable way. The purpose of the project was to analyse and to evaluate the existing solutions at selected European railways for all required modules at the entrance (doors, information and safety solutions), to derive a design concept, to develop a mock-up in meeting the needs of rail travellers with the above mentioned impairments and to test it with user groups. The project also aims at deriving components for the determination of standards. The EUPAX Design Mock-up test was performed to verify the advantages of the layout of the train segment including the different modules such as access area (including the access door, gaps between platform and train as well as boarding aid devices), entrance vestibule, information systems inside and outside the train, emergency facilities, toilet with all conveniences and the additional test arrangements regarding push buttons, steps and emergency equipment. For this purpose a questionnaire was developed for the assessment of the EUPAX segment and the additional test arrangements. With the help of this questionnaire it was possible to execute a quantitative and qualitative evaluation. During three test phases 67 experts and handicapped persons from 6 countries have evaluated the Industrial Design mock-up based on this questionnaire. The test group covered persons from North (Denmark) to the South (Italy) and from the West (Spain) to the Middle of Europe (Germany). This is especially important for the generalization (harmonisation) of the results for all European countries. According to COST 335 the information for people with reduced mobility should be clear, concise, accurate and timely. So that all information can be received from persons, they must be transferred on at least two of the three possible ways (acoustical, visual, tactile), a so called "2-sense-principle". Based on the results ergonomic specifications/ solutions for the ergonomic design of the access area, the acoustic, visual and tactile information and the emergency devices including the emergency communication system were developed, related to the benefiting passenger groups.

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Development of an Imaging Based Gang Protection System

  • Grimm, M.;Pelz, M.
    • International Journal of Railway
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    • v.1 no.4
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    • pp.149-156
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    • 2008
  • During maintenance or construction works in or at the tracks of railways, high risks for passengers and railway staff, especially for the workers on the construction site exist. The high risks result out of the movement of rail vehicles, like trains or construction vehicles, which must be faced by using any available technical and operational technologies for securing them against the environment. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the level of protection continuously and to identify new and innovative methods and technologies for the protection of the gang (construction worker, machines and material). Especially on construction sites at line sections with two or more parallel tracks but also with single tracks, there are still a lot of incidents and accidents mostly with seriously injured persons or fatalities. These were mainly gang members that breach the railway-loading gage. By using proper warning or protection systems, the avoidance of such accidents must be achieved. The latest developments. in gang protection systems concern on the one hand fixed barriers in the middle between the construction site and the operated track and on the other hand construction vehicles equipped with automatic warning systems. The disadvantage of such protection methods is that the gang can be warned against an approaching train but a monitoring of the gang members cannot be performed. Only one part of a potential dangerous situation will be detected. If the gang members will overhear the acoustic warning signal of the security staff and the workers will not leave the danger zone in the track, the driver of the approaching train had no chance to react to the dangerous situation. An accident is often inevitable. While the detection of acoustic warning signals by the gang members working on a construction site is very difficult, the acoustical planning of an automatic warning system has to be designed for an acoustic short range level of one meter besides the construction vehicle. The decision about the use of today's technical warning system (fixed systems, automatic warning systems, etc.) must be geared to the technical feasibility and the level of safety which is needed. Criteria for decision guidance to block a track should be developed by danger estimation and economical variables. To realize the actual jurisdiction and to minimize the hazards of railway operations by the use of construction vehicles near the tracks further developments are needed. This means, that the warning systems have to be enhanced to systems for protection, which monitor the realization of the warning signal as a precondition for giving a movement authority to a train. This method can protect against accidents caused by predictable wrongdoing. The actual state of the art technique of using a collective warning combined with additional security staff is no longer acceptable. Therefore, the Institute of Transportation System of the German Aerospace Center in Braunschweig (Germany) will develop a gang warning and protection system based upon imaging methods, with optical sensors such as video in visible and invisible ranges, radar, laser, and other. The advantage of such a system based on the possibility to monitor both the gang itself and the railway-loading gauge either of the parallel track or of the same track still in use. By monitoring both situations, the system will be able to generate a warning message for the approaching train, that there are obstacles in the track, so that the train can be stopped to prevent an accident. And also the gang workers will be warned, while they breach their area.

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