Strength consideration on car body of light rail transit making from aluminum extrusion

Abstract

Abstract There are two common series of aluminum alloy that used to construct car body of light rail transit (LRT), i.e. Al 6061 and Al 6005a. Type of Al 6005a has lower strength but cheaper rather than Al 6061. In this numerical study, their extrusion characteristics based on strength consideration are analyzed using ANSYS Workbench 18. The 3D solid model is extracted from interior-exterior facet models of LRT. To save computational time, the car body model is simplified by removing fillets and then generating a symmetrical model. Anyhow, the effect of fillet removal is also studied by introducing a correction factor. Four cases of static loading are given to observe actual loading phenomena that could occur. The simulation results indicated that Al 6005a has better characteristics to be used for constructing the car body of LRT. In addition, simplifying the model in the FEM simulation of a rail-based car body using a shell element type and applying a correction factor to the simulation results is a breakthrough simulation method that could improve the accuracy of the results.