BANDUNG, itb.ac.id–Prof. Dr. Ir. Bagus Budiwantoro, delivered the Scientific Oration of Professors of the Bandung Institute of Technology on Saturday (20/8/2022) in the West Hall of ITB. The professor from the Faculty of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (FTMD) presented the results of his research related to “Passive Safety Systems in Passenger Train Structures”.
What is passive safety technology? Explained by Prof. Bagus Budiwantoro is a technology that guarantees the safety of passengers passively on the train structure. Safety itself can be categorized into two parts, namely active and passive safety. This passive safety means that in the event of an accident, the passengers remain safe. However, this accident resulted in two things, namely primary and secondary effects (the passenger compartment was not damaged, but the passenger was still injured due to the impact).
Based on these consequences, crashworthiness technology was designed , namely the ability of a structure to protect the safety of passengers in the event of a collision. “We designed a train that in the event of an accident, the passenger area is not damaged,” he explained.
So that the passenger area is not damaged, it is necessary to have a structure on the part of the train that must be damaged first in the event of an accident. This area is the crash zone area. Examples of such areas are toilets on transportation. In that area, the force due to the collision will be absorbed thereby reducing the impact on the passenger area.
In determining the crashworthiness structure , it is necessary to consider two criteria, namely the two crash zone structure criteria (passengers are safe and controlled deceleration) and the criteria for passenger injury. There are several standard criteria for passenger injury, one of which is based on the deceleration parameter to determine passenger safety. The criteria are Head Injury Criterion (HIC) / Severity Index (SI).
Through SI calculations, we can determine the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS). From this AIS we can find out the possible level of passenger injury. The higher the SI range, the higher the AIS. “This is all quantified, everything has a standard, so through this crashworthiness we can safely calculate the distance from one seat to another,” he said. This technology has been applied in several public transportations such as the Jabodebek LRT and Metrokapsul.
Prof. Bagus, who is also the researcher behind Metrokapsul, said that the type and quality of the structure must have been considered since the design process. It aims to make the selection of the type of structure competitive during mass production. The structure used is crashboxes.
“The design process needs to pay attention to crashworthiness , regulation, and material parameters in order to obtain a model that can be simulated. The simulation will take place iteratively so that the advantages and disadvantages of each model are obtained,” he said.
Closing his speech, Prof. Bagus explained that the migration to mass transportation could increase the unemployment rate because the production of private vehicles decreased. Therefore, he advised us to love the Republic of Indonesia. “There are three kinds of love for the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia, namely independent technology, independent labor, independent decisions,” he concluded.
Source: Institut Teknologi Bandung