Focus on Germany Allan Hall reports from Berlin

NEWS

TECHNOLOGYSPOTLIGHT

Advances in technology across industry

Railway researchers complete a new virtual testing project

Aproject that could enable manufacturers of rail vehicles to use virtual testing of trains in order to ensure safety standards throughout Europe while making huge savings on development costs has relied on a key contribution from a research team based at the UK’s University of Huddersfield.

Among the partners in the DynoTRAIN project – alongside manufacturers and rail infrastructure bodies in seven European nations – is the Institute for Railway Research (IRR), which occupies a purposebuilt suite of labs at the University of Huddersfield.

A speciality of the IRR is in the development of modelling software that can simulate the dynamic behaviour of railway vehicles, leading to an estimate of the safe operation of a train in differing conditions.

“One of our tasks as part of DynoTRAIN has been to build mathematical tools that take data collected from different countries about the track and synthesise that data into a representative track that you would use in a virtual test environment,” explained The IRR’s Head of Research Dr Yann Bezin.

But it relies on a massive database of information about real tracks and real railway systems and this was gathered as part of DynoTRAIN by assembling a special train – locomotives, passenger carriages and freight wagons – fitted out with a battery of testing equipment, such as a laser system that captured the shape of the rail every 25 cms over thousands of kilometres. Visit: www.hud.ac.uk

Tracking tools

The annual financial impact of FOD (Foreign Object Damage) is estimated to be billions of dollars, with indirect costs often higher than direct costs. This applies across all sectors of industry due to material and human risks (non-compliance, production delays, incidents affecting individuals).

The synergy of the Facom and Cribmaster brands, divisions of the Stanley Black & Decker group, has enabled the development of the most advanced solution on the market for tracking tools by using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification).

RFID technology is a wireless technology that allows storage and retrieval of information remotely. It enables the identification of a tool thanks to an electronic chip which is encapsulated inside it. It uses the energy propagated by the short distance radio signal from the transmitter. Facom engineers sought an integration of this RFID chip to ensure the best data transmission. Enclosed within a shock-resistant shell, the chip is durably protected, even against chemical agents, without modifying the basic features of the tool or its ergonomics. Visit: www.facom.com

Understanding turbulence

Scientists have developed a new understanding of how turbulence works, which could help to optimise vehicle performance and save billions in global energy costs.

Dr Ati Sharma, a senior lecturer in aerodynamics and flight mechanics at the University of Southampton, has been working in collaboration with Beverley McKeon, professor of aeronautics and associate director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to build models of turbulent flow.

Recently, they developed a new and improved way of predicting the composition of turbulence near walls, which could lead to significant fuel savings, as a large amount of energy is consumed by ships and planes, for example, to counteract turbulence-induced drag. Finding a way to reduce the drag by 30% could save the global economy billions of dollars in fuel costs and associated emissions annually.

Sharma and McKeon’s latest work provides a way of analysing a large-scale flow by breaking it down into smaller, simpler subequations, or ‘blocks’ that can be simply added together to introduce more complexity and eventually get back to the full equations. With very few blocks, things look a lot like the results of an extremely expensive, real-flow simulation or a full laboratory experiment, but the mathematics are simple enough to be performed on a laptop computer.

“We now have a low-cost way of looking at the ‘skeleton’ of wall turbulence,” says Professor McKeon. “It was surprising to find that turbulence condenses to these essential building blocks so easily.” Visit: www.soton.ac.uk