Download PDF
Enhancing Safety and Comfort of Japan’s Bullet Trains: A Case Study on Nippon Sharyo and AcuSolve
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Digital Twin / Simulation
- Sensors - Haptic Sensors
Applicable Industries
- Railway & Metro
- Transportation
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Manufacturing Process Simulation
- Public Transportation Management
Services
- Training
The Challenge
Nippon Sharyo, a leading manufacturer of railroad cars in Japan, faced a complex challenge in enhancing the safety and comfort of their bullet trains. The aerodynamic pressures exerted on the trains, especially when entering and exiting tunnels or passing other trains, posed significant safety risks and discomfort to passengers. The pressure wave created when a train enters a tunnel could cause loud noise and vibration, and the collision of pressure waves when two trains pass each other in a tunnel could produce a force strong enough to push one train away from the other. If not properly managed, these forces could potentially derail the train or at least cause a jarring experience for passengers. Other factors such as unsteady loads when trains pass in open landscapes, the impact of crosswinds, noise from the door frame, and ensuring optimal airflow from heating and air conditioning systems also needed to be considered to maximize passenger safety and comfort.
About The Customer
Nippon Sharyo, headquartered in Nagoya, Japan, has been in the business of building trains since the late 19th century. Today, it is one of Japan’s most prolific manufacturers of railroad cars, with 1,100 employees building various types of trains such as express, commuter, metro & subway, and light rail vehicles for railroad systems worldwide. The company also designs and produces cars for the growing fleet of bullet trains in Japan. Since the development of the first bullet train in 1964, Nippon Sharyo has manufactured more than 3,200 cars for these high-speed trains, with each train consisting of 8 to 16 cars. The latest versions of the bullet train are capable of carrying passengers at speeds of 300 km/h.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Nippon Sharyo turned to Altair’s AcuSolve computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. Building physical prototypes of the trains was expensive, so the company used AcuSolve to examine the complex airflows impacting the train and its passengers. The software was used in three key areas: safety, amenities, and manufacturing. For safety, AcuSolve helped estimate crosswind loads, wind velocities at ground level, and the aerodynamics of passing trains. In terms of amenities, the software was used to study tunnel entry noise, HVAC flow, aeroacoustics, and vibration in the car trailing the engine. For manufacturing, AcuSolve was used to design the friction stir welding process used in constructing the car. The software allowed Nippon Sharyo to build better products by helping them find the best solutions to increasingly complex physics problems.
Operational Impact
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Airport SCADA Systems Improve Service Levels
Modern airports are one of the busiest environments on Earth and rely on process automation equipment to ensure service operators achieve their KPIs. Increasingly airport SCADA systems are being used to control all aspects of the operation and associated facilities. This is because unplanned system downtime can cost dearly, both in terms of reduced revenues and the associated loss of customer satisfaction due to inevitable travel inconvenience and disruption.
Case Study
IoT-based Fleet Intelligence Innovation
Speed to market is precious for DRVR, a rapidly growing start-up company. With a business model dependent on reliable mobile data, managers were spending their lives trying to negotiate data roaming deals with mobile network operators in different countries. And, even then, service quality was a constant concern.
Case Study
Digitize Railway with Deutsche Bahn
To reduce maintenance costs and delay-causing failures for Deutsche Bahn. They need manual measurements by a position measurement system based on custom-made MEMS sensor clusters, which allow autonomous and continuous monitoring with wireless data transmission and long battery. They were looking for data pre-processing solution in the sensor and machine learning algorithms in the cloud so as to detect critical wear.
Case Study
Cold Chain Transportation and Refrigerated Fleet Management System
1) Create a digital connected transportation solution to retrofit cold chain trailers with real-time tracking and controls. 2) Prevent multi-million dollar losses due to theft or spoilage. 3) Deliver a digital chain-of-custody solution for door to door load monitoring and security. 4) Provide a trusted multi-fleet solution in a single application with granular data and access controls.
Case Study
Vehicle Fleet Analytics
Organizations frequently implement a maintenance strategy for their fleets of vehicles using a combination of time and usage based maintenance schedules. While effective as a whole, time and usage based schedules do not take into account driving patterns, environmental factors, and sensors currently deployed within the vehicle measuring crank voltage, ignition voltage, and acceleration, all of which have a significant influence on the overall health of the vehicle.In a typical fleet, a large percentage of road calls are related to electrical failure, with battery failure being a common cause. Battery failures result in unmet service agreement levels and costly re-adjustment of scheduled to provide replacement vehicles. To reduce the impact of unplanned maintenance, the transportation logistics company was interested in a trial of C3 Vehicle Fleet Analytics.
Case Study
3M Gains Real-Time Insight with Cloud Solution
The company has a long track record of innovative technology solutions. For example, 3M helps its customers optimize parking operations by automating fee collection and other processes. To improve support for this rapidly expanding segment, 3M needed to automate its own data collection and reporting. The company had recently purchased the assets of parking, tolling, and automatic license plate reader businesses, and required better insight into these acquisitions. Chad Reed, Global Business Manager for 3M Parking Systems, says, “With thousands of installations across the world, we couldn’t keep track of our software and hardware deployments, which made it difficult to understand our market penetration.” 3M wanted a tracking application that sales staff could use to get real-time information about the type and location of 3M products in parking lots and garages. So that it could be used on-site with potential customers, the solution would have to provide access to data anytime, anywhere, and from an array of mobile devices. Jason Fox, Mobile Application Architect at 3M, upped the ante by volunteering to deliver the new app in one weekend. For Fox and his team, these requirements meant turning to the cloud instead of an on-premises datacenter. “My first thought was to go directly to the cloud because we needed to provide access not only to our salespeople, but to resellers who didn’t have access to our internal network,” says Fox. “The cloud just seemed like a logical choice.”
