Rail Passenger Equipment Crashworthiness Testing Requirements and Implementation

This paper describes the requirements and the implementation of a series of impact tests of rail passenger equipment. The test requirements — the desired measurements — are dictated by the characteristics of the vehicle, as well as uncertainties in the analysis techniques used to evaluate the collision behavior of the equipment. The required measurements are implemented with available measurement transducers, including accelerometers, strain gages, and string potentiometers. The measurement data are gathered using an on-board data acquisition system.