International Electrotechnical Commission

Environmental conditions – Vibration and shock of electrotechnical equipment – Part 3: Equipment transported in rail vehicles - Edition 1.0
 N TR 62131-3

Annotation

IEC/TR 62131-3, which is a technical report, reviews the available dynamic data relating to electrotechnical equipment transported by rail vehicles. The intent is that from all the available data an environmental description will be generated and compared to that set out in IEC 60721.

For each of the sources identified the quality of the data is reviewed and checked for self consistency. The process used to undertake this check of data quality and that used to intrinsically categorize the various data sources is set out in IEC/TR 62131-1.

This technical report primarily addresses data extracted from a number of different sources for which reasonable confidence exist as to their quality and validity. The assessment also presents data for which the quality and validity cannot realistically be reviewed. These data are included to facilitate validation of information from other sources. The report clearly indicates when it utilizes information in this latter category.

This technical report addresses vibration and shock data from three different measurement exercises, i.e. one on the UK rail system and two on the USA rail system. Although one of these relates to a multimodal system in limited use world wide, data from it are included to facilitate validation of information from other sources. The vast majority of the rail measurements reviewed are from the USA and the remainder from Western Europe. Some of the data sources considered indicate the inclusion of some quite old vehicles. It has not been possible to identify the rail data considered in setting the existing IEC 60721 severities.

Although the majority of the measurement exercises considered in this technical report supplied both vibration and shock information, a number of measurement exercises are biased towards the shock conditions of rail transportation. The severity and incidence of shocks is mostly related to the occurrence shunting of individual wagons. The occurrence of shunting of individual wagons is in turn dependant upon the operational strategy adopted by the national rail systems. A significant number of rail systems no longer adopt methods of operation which assemble train sets when the wagons are carrying sophisticated goods (carriage of bulky raw minerals is a common exception). Other rail systems purposely utilize good quality wagons and/or procedures of operation to significantly mitigate shunting loads. These strategies are intended to minimize shock severities for sensitive equipment such as electrotechnical equipment.