Interesting video:
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Shake, rattle & bump
technology theft
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China Observer is an outlet for the bizarre religious group, Falun Gong. Another outlet of theirs, Vision Times, presented as factual a report that doctors recovered from COVID-19 by reciting the nine sacred words of Falun Gong. It had also published a report that former Chinese political leaders were interested in eating human brains. As my mother and one of my history professors said, âConsider the source.â
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Yale University:
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Interesting but quite out of date. Gov. Schwarzenegger?? Article is from 2010, originally in the Wall Street Journal.
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I find it dubious that HSR multiwear wheels first require dressing at 1.2 million km, and wear to 2.4 million km before replacement. I also find it a bit silly that European wheel steel and fabrication have a strict no-patent, no-technical-discussion trade-secret policy â as if there is some mystic secret about alloys and fabrication for HSR use.
Safe only to 125mph? Thatâs so dubious as to verge on laughable. I do agree with the idea that consequences of shock and wear go up dramatically above 300 km/h, for comparatively small time gains, but that has little to do with technical ability to build to 320 or 350 km/h standard.
Incidentally it seems the Avelia Liberty sets in the NEC are at the very last weeks of their acceptance testing, so we ought to have some interesting experience of our own about 350 km/h-capable equipment in long-term service soonâŚ
Looks to me as if those vibrations are akin to corrugation, which would indicate improper wheel dressing or rail grinding, rather than some carefully-undisclosed-in-the-video failure of wheel structure due to inadequate materials or fabrication quality.
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[quote=âWoke_Hoagland, post:6, topic:413650, full:trueâ]
I find it dubious that HSR multiwear wheels first require dressing at 1.2 million km, and wear to 2.4 million km before replacement. I also find it a bit silly that European wheel steel and fabrication have a strict no-patent, no-technical-discussion trade-secret policy â as if there is some mystic secret about alloys and fabrication for HSR use.
Safe only to 125mph? Thatâs so dubious as to verge on laughable. I do agree with the idea that consequences of shock and wear go up dramatically above 300 km/h, for comparatively small time gains, but that has little to do with technical ability to build to 320 or 350 km/h standard.
Incidentally it seems the Avelia Liberty sets in the NEC are at the very last weeks of their acceptance testing, so we ought to have some interesting experience of our own about 350 km/h-capable equipment in long-term service soonâŚ
Looks to me as if those vibrations are akin to corrugation, which would indicate improper wheel dressing or rail grinding, rather than some carefully-undisclosed-in-the-video failure of wheel structure due to inadequate materials or fabrication quality.
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I have no idea about Fulun Gong or whatever but I did Google, one of their religious principles is honesty which would indeed make them a concern of the CCP and potentially an enemy of the state.
Regardless, a lot of what was stated in the video. Some was repeated in the Yale University study. Further as dismissive as both of you have been. Niether one of you thought to research a source in China on this topicâŚandâŚpoof! (below). I donât know, to me a chunk of the claims check out. Possibly they connected some dots wrongâŚpossibly not.
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Yeah, you are just the sort of person who would believe HSR wheels routinely exceed 1000 C at the tread in normal running, and have ânumerous bearings and small parts with intricate designsâ requiring preternatural precision fabrication.
Right at the beginning they start invoking the Wickens-style precise coned tread for self-steering discussion⌠which does not apply to HSR treads operating at the speeds implied by the equipment in their illustration. You can find much better technical references once youâve researched the basic technology enough.
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Which is a minutely tiny part of the original points of the videoâs arguments, if it is even a point at all. Noticed you didnât counter what China stated itself in the second article. Believe what you want to believe. I am just posting the citations you guys wanted me too a lot earlier. Look where we are. Same place we would be without the citations.
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I donât trust anything âChinaâ states itself, unless technically backed up. It is quite possible that the Chinese chose not to put the necessary work into wheel development and fabrication, and are now encountering problems with chatter in cheek-plate braking as a result. Whether this gets explained over the next few months in places like rail/wheel interaction conferences is yet to be seen, but unfortunately I donât expect this to be something objectively provided by the Chinese themselves. The thing is, I do understand whatâs involved in high-speed operation, and what is and isnât relevant to an understanding of high-speed guiding concerns, so just providing a couple of Google hits that seem to contain discussions of the subject but actually get important things misunderstood or misstated donât really count as âreferencesâ in a technical discussion.
Iâll be really interested to find out whatâs actually causing that high-frequency vibration, and in what plane(s) it originates. Whatever it is is coupling through the secondary suspension, so if it is indeed related to tread flats from excessive spot braking or wheelslide, or fillet or flange deformation, it would have to be fairly severe and at some critical resonant frequency. If a wheel were to warp slightly the cheek plates might bind against the pads once or twice per revolution, with the same effects as produced by a warped automobile disc-brake rotor.
What I think is less likely is that an improperly-damped axle set is preferentially wearing too soft a wheel progressively out of round, or that wheels with defectively-machined seats are moving laterally on the axle. Those have solutions, too, and I canât imagine the current crop of Chinese-trained Chinese engineers wouldnât be able ti track down the issues and their causes and develop ways to fix them âat scaleâ. Whether the pariah government implements the fixes is another issue, and while itâs relevant in the context of HSR discussion, it too easily devolves into mere politics.
I have just been reading, in a different context, how statistical process control came to Japan in the early '60s â another transportation-related technology-transfer issue. When the Chinese were so interested in acquiring nearly-free best practices in the mid-Nineties, this seemed to be one of their concerns (they saw how effective it had been for Japan by the end of the '80s, and only then stopped because of banking implosion) so I find it hard to believe that they donât have âthe knowledgeâ to make good precision wheels, and to scale that process up to suit their â if we believe what they say â remarkably heavy fast HSR traffic. Reading between the lines, they will also need a large number of underfloor dressing lathes with accurate centerless profiling capability, and perhaps ability to apply heat-treatment or hard-coating in situ (which implies CA), so watch for that in connection with machine-tool development and marketing.
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The same video was already discussed in November 2024 in another forum. At that time I have not found any other source in German or English.
Other than the fact that there are obviously vibrations, I donât know what to do with the video in the first post
I do not believe that a lack of knowledge of the technology of high-speed rail wheels has led to wheel damage. The Chinese company Full Hill Enterprises bought the company Bochumer Verein Verkehrstechnik GmbH (BVV), a German manufacturer of high-speed wheels, in 2017.
The Chinese not only had the wheel know-how through BVV, but also through a joint venture founded in 2007 under the name Zhibo Lucchini Railway Equipment Ltd between Luchini RS, an Italian manufacturer of high-speed wheelsets, and the Chinese company Zhibo Transport Equipment.
There were wheels suitable for 320 km/h (200 mph) in Europe and Japan. The much harsher environmental conditions in China and the extrapolation to 380 km/h (237 mph) in regular operation might have led to faster wear and, as a result, vibrations. This is indicated by the statement on the website of a BVV subsidiary: ER8 and ER8C standard materials, which used to be the norm on high-speed lines in China, have reached their limits due to sometimes challenging environmental and usage conditions.
Source: https://bt-be.de/en/materialentwicklung/
As a result, BVV developed a new wheel design/steel alloy between 2017 and 2019 that meets these extreme requirements, UltraDur ER8H: Speeds up to 380 km/h, temperature fluctuations from -40 ° C to + 45 ° C, humidity up to 95%, resistance to strong winds, rain, snow and acid rain, sandstorms and salt spray and the like.
Source: https://www.bochumer-verein.de/en/ultraharter-werkstoff-fuer-china/
However, the existing know-how does not rule out errors in the manufacture of the steel alloy or in production.
Unfortunately, it is not clear from the video when the sequences with the vibrations originated. Providing sources would have made the video more credible.
Somewhere in the video it is claimed that Germany stopped exporting high-speed rail wheels to China at one point.
I contacted the German Ministry of Economic Affairs. They replied that there has never been an export stop to China for these wheels.
Regards, Volker
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Another parallel topic with some overlap:
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Which is the problem with items like this is we will probably never know for sure. China learned from Russia. Both countries suppress negative information about events internally that they believe erodes their external image.
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I think weâll figure out what it was at some point: there is certainly at least one objective cause, and I think there are in fact people in China technically qualified to analyze and then deal with it. The concern is whether Chinese politics whitewashes over the problem until it proceeds to an accident â or until they have a deployed solution that saves face.
The whole expansion of Chinese HSR is less than two decades old, with extensive rollout of â380 km/hâ peak speeds at scale being far more recent, and trains running longer distances and far greater frequency also being within a matter of a few years. I would not be surprised to see unanticipated common-mode problems develop in some aspects⌠perhaps in ways that require some of that accumulated Chinese capital to be more lavishly spent than expected. I would not in fact be surprised to find that some of the recent âindigenous developmentâ has teething troubles that do not have a cost-effective solution, probably meaning that peak speeds are quietly cut back while the money is thrown at those HSR-in-a-tube developments and expanded maglev.
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The International Journal of Rail Transportation published an article titled Mechanism of high-speed train carbody shaking due to degradation of wheel-rail contact geometry by Chinese scientists in its Volume 11, 2023: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23248378.2022.2077850#abstract
According to the article the vibration occured mainly in and around stations. The authers made live test with an empty train on a high-speed line between Beijing and Shanghai in the area between Shanghai and Nanjing in eastern China
The operating mileage of the tested HST after wheel re-profiling was about 224,000 km (140,000 miles).
They built an FE-model using the live test results to verify the model. It was then used to test different parameters possibly influencing the vibrations. The paper is very technical. Though Iâm a civil engineer I havenât tried to go into detail.
But the conclusions are interesting again, quote:
(1) A FE model updating approach that combined measured modal data with simulation modal
data was applied to build the rigid-flexible coupled dynamics model. The modal updating
process ensures the accuracy of the carbody FE model. CSP modelling depends on an
accurate carbody FE model.
(2) The worn wheel-rail profiles have a significant influence on the CSP, and CSP is easy to appear in
the case of worn rail and concave worn wheel. The appearance of the CSP on the railway main
line is mainly related to the deterioration of wheel-rail contact geometry. This means that the
wheel-rail contact geometry should be inspected in time to avoid the development of the CSP.
(3) The combination of the wheel-rail impacts in multiple turnout sections and the WWP will
aggravate the CSP when HST passing through railway stations. In order to avoid serious CSP
in turnout area, it is a possible countermeasure to appropriately reduce the running speed of
HST passing through the station.
Countermeasures are under development.
Regards, Volker
PS: The site contains a button âview pdfâ that leads to an online viwer from where you can download it.
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Yeah anti-science. You know nothing about Falun Gong. I have actually talked to them. The only reason they oppose China is because they were banned as dangerous just as in a similar manner Scientology was banned in Germany.
And there was no Yale Study. Yale simply repeated an old WSJ article in which some European manufacturers were concerned about Chinese competition.
The Chinese article says zilch about the vibrations shown in the z Falun Gong video. Apparently you didnât read it.
Since you donât seem to understand Woke either, perhaps it would behoove you to read more carefully first,?
I approach religious groups with an open mind. Religion is in part based on social mores. I find your description of the group highly suspect though. Does not read analogous to Scientology to me.
Do you have any objectivity as it relates to China for example? Perhaps they connected the dots wrong but a lot of the dots appear in both the Yale and CRRC articles. Not sure I can dismiss all the allegations made.
Also, Germany vs Scientology. Worlds of difference from China vs any religious group.
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Have to wonder if any of this supposed vibration was either in the Alstom engineering that slowed the approval of the AX-2s. Maybe something the FRA was looking for in the models that may or may not exist?
Itâs simply a case of familiarity with Falun Gong for over 30 years, their newspaper, information about them easily available through a search on Google and actual first hand experience. First hand experience seems to be something you mistrust whether monr or a former forum member who had actually ridden China Rail (and Indonesia and Japan). You have had no experience on any HSR. You also seem to mistrust the more expert knowledge of others such as Volker and Woke, perhaps because you donât understand their posts?
Your anti-China bias is obvious. I have studied China in an academic setting. I actually have been there many times and have had frank discussions with Chinese consular and ambassadorial staff as well as students there and here and several Chinese professors. Many of all of the above have been quite critical of the CCP. You have zero background, just unspecified blogs.
You can complain about this post but nothing here is as hominem , just facts.
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Even a quick scan of Wiki would have shown you the anti-science nonsense of Falun Gong and its autocratic leader.
" According to the founder Li in his book, Zhuan Falun , he claims to have cultivated supernatural powers starting at age eight. According to Radio France International, Zhuan Falun also promises practitioners supernatural powers such as âsee[ing] through a wall or into a human bodyâ.
Perhaps its practicioners can X-ray the wheel in question?