3D Digital Simulation for Material Damage Mechanism Identification in a Railway Carriage Pressure Vessel

Digital simulation approaches applied to railway engineering allow to investigate different railway scenarios via 3D digital twins of real objects, motion simulation, and collision detection to identify the root causes of critical damage and estimate the most likely sources of railway accidents. In this work, a digital simulation approach is applied to a real catastrophic train accident in which a railway carriage carrying a pressure vessel collided with an obstacle that generated a cut in the pressure vessel casing. This cut initiated a liquefied petroleum gas leakage that expanded in the environment and caused the explosion and blaze responsible for human casualties. Traditional railway accident reconstruction procedures identified two potential objects accountable for the cutting of the pressure vessel casing: a wing rail and a track reference stake. Based on digital terrain models and reconstructed models of the railway carriage, 3D digital simulation scenarios were created to detect every possible collision of the pressure vessel with the infrastructure environment and investigate whether the shape of the cut in the pressure vessel wall fits the damage visible on the obstacles and whether the interference between obstacle and pressure vessel wall could generate the chip through an interaction similar to metal cutting.