Phil Barrett AP South Rail Sales Expert – Dassault Systèmes
Globally, the movement of freight is shifting to rail. The market for rail freight is expected to grow to reach 1,150 ton-km by 2050. Yet, rail operations in Asia Pacific are marred by frequent disruptions and accidents caused by outdated systems with low predictability of reliability and safety. The manual tools, mathematical models, and in-house software used to ensure rail safety, sustainability, and reliability can deliver suboptimal results. Safe and reliable rail operations, along with advancing sustainability mandates, require innovative simulation tools to provide tangible results.
Ensuring safety
A critical concern for rail operators is safety, as derailments and accidents pose significant risks to both infrastructure and the people who use it, including passengers, personnel, and cargo. Major rail derailment incidents and accidents continue to occur across Australia, even as a 2024 report on the Australian Rail Transport Corporation’s interstate access network showed that it lacked resilience. Rail incidents involving loss of life happened in New Zealand as well last year. One reason is that as freight and passenger volumes increase, trains are becoming longer and traffic is moving at higher speeds than in the past, adding complexity to safety risks. The recent increase in derailments means rail safety managers are under pressure to optimise their systems.
If the functioning of emergency braking systems is not optimised, obstructions caused by environmental factors such as mud, rock slides or track damage can carry collateral risks. Advanced simulation tools are essential for engineers to conduct detailed analyses that ensure operational safety, enhance performance, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards.
Simulating key workflows – derailment analysis, emergency braking, and critical speed analysis using vehicle dynamics solutions can help address crucial risks in rail freight. Rail managers can run homologation tests in compliance with country-specific regulation standards such as European Standard EN 14363, which covers derailment analysis for railway applications and outlines the requirements for evaluating the running behaviour of rail vehicles by using virtual simulation tools.
Modeling rail vehicle dynamics under different operational conditions — such as sharp turns or adverse weather — help determine the derailment and rollover risks and minimize potential incidents.
Multi-body modeling can support the simulation of various train configurations across different track types, such as curved or S-shaped tracks. These simulation capabilities for rollover analysis provide deep insights into how different train sequences behave under stress, to identify rollover factors. Rail engineers can improve overall stability and guide design and maintenance enhancements of trains with a deeper understanding of dynamic vehicle behavior.
Emergency braking is a crucial safety concern for rail vehicles, involving complex dynamics that pose risks of coupler failures and excessive longitudinal forces between cars. Rail engineers are required to simulate the entire braking process, factoring in wheel-rail interactions, brake force distribution and train composition to examine the effects of sudden deceleration. These analyses help prevent incidents like jack-knifing or equipment failure and ensure that braking systems are designed for maximum safety and efficiency.
A sophisticated simulation strategy enhances vehicle behavior predictions, thereby enabling engineers to foresee and mitigate potential challenges before they escalate. This strategy also facilitates simulation-supported maintenance, accident investigations and warranty or misuse case analyses to provide effective and deeper insights into real-world safety issues in a virtual environment.
When rail vehicles run near their critical speed, they can experience dangerous phenomena like hunting oscillations, where excessive lateral motions destabilize the vehicle. These instabilities can lead to derailments, track damage or passenger discomfort. Trains exceeding their safe operational speed on particular track sections or encountering resonance due to track irregularities significantly increase the risk of derailment.
Engineers are required to perform critical speed analyses for intermodal cars, whether empty or fully loaded. Using this simulation, they need to understand the safe maximum speeds of freight trains based on their configurations, loads and track conditions, and find out how various speeds affect lateral oscillations.
Typically engineers conduct physical testing on railway vehicles to meet homologation requirements, which certifies that the vehicles are safe for operation. Physical testing involves cost, time and risk.
Virtual homologation tests eliminate the costs and risks associated with physical testing by conducting a significant part of the tests virtually in a much shorter period of time.
It helps address potential faults in the design phase, improve safety and performance, and reduce operational risks.
Ensuring reliability in rail operations
The frequency of accidents in Asia Pacific rail networks reaffirm the need for a reliable system to predict and mitigate such risks. The currently used physical testing and validation methods are labor intensive and expensive. For example, simulating situations that cause derailments typically involve derailing train cars, a risky maneuver. Mathematical computations poorly accommodate complexity and often deliver inaccurate results.
A rail freight vehicle dynamics simulation solution that integrates real-time data with multi-physics and multi-scale analyses can accurately pinpoint potential failures before they arise..
Such a solution supports early, proactive resolution of issues, rather than reactive ones. More informed decision-making and significantly lower risk of similar incidents in the future are the results of this comprehensive analysis.
The combination of rail vehicle dynamics simulation and aerodynamics simulation in one solution can overcome traditional limitations in simulating parameters and testing limits. A solution that uses digital 3D mockups, virtual demos and unlimited simulation scenarios and encompassing the entire product lifecycle of rail components — from design and simulation to operations and maintenance — can help operators monitor and maintain their assets effectively while minimizing downtime and maximizing rolling stock utilization.
Modern virtual twin technology-based solutions can combine aerodynamic inputs into vehicle dynamics simulations to assess intercoupling forces and derailment risks. A holistic approach and unique capabilities are required to enhance rail reliability. Virtual twins make it possible to conduct previously impossible tasks that help rail operators achieve more with less cost.
Moreover, these solutions can foster closer collaboration and seamless integration of digital technologies enabling cross-departmental collaboration bringing the workflows and interactions of operations managers and safety, engineering and fleet managers on one page. This integration helps them communicate simultaneously and efficiently, which in turn significantly minimizes disruptions while increasing safety, reliability and sustainability.
Driving fuel efficiency and sustainability
Reducing fuel consumption is a key component of global railway sustainability. Aerodynamic drag remains the key controllable factor affecting rail fuel efficiency. Testing various combinations of various engines and wagons is key to managing aerodynamic drag. This includes studying how pulling and pushing forces vary, particularly when forces become negative. Effectively studying aerodynamic drag on a train of hundreds of cars requires advanced simulation tools and techniques.
The simulation software must manage diverse configurations and provide insights into how different arrangements influence drag and overall performance. It is important that you use a best-in-class scalable simulation solution due to the complexity of these scenarios. Simulation technologies, particularly those leveraging virtual twin technology, provide a powerful approach to addressing these challenges.