Numerical Simulation of Body Heat Transfer Coefficient Test of a Railway Vehicle

The body heat transfer coefficient of a railway vehicle is an essential parameter for designing vehicle. The proposed method in this paper could be used to simulate the test conditions of body heat transfer coefficient of a railway vehicle. The simulated object was a middle of high speed train and the numerical simulation was two-dimensional due to the limitation of RAM capacity of PC computers. Simulation results with five different meshing showed body heat transfer coefficient was affected greatly by the amount of grids. Existence of thermal bridge would increase body heat transfer coefficient significantly, which was concluded by the simulation of two models. Three typical cross sections of a middle were used for simulation of the body heat transfer coefficient and the weighted mean value was 1.30 W/m2.K. The difference was only 7% compared with the actual test value of 1.215 W/m2.K, which indicated the advantage of this method.