The Velaro CRH3 is a high-speed train developed for use in China, and has parallels to the German ICE 3 series.
The first Velaro CRH3 high-speed trains were commissioned in early 2008, a week before the start of the Summer Olympics in Beijing, for scheduled passenger operations on the route between Beijing and the port city of Tianjin. With the Velaro CRH3 achieving peak speeds of over 390 km/h, in its day, the 155 km journey was the fastest train journey in the world.
ITB GmbH conducted the complete development work for the crossbeam of the Velaro CRH3, a component that connects the superstructure with the undercarriage of the train. The project extended over a period of about 2 years, from the initial feasibility study, through the computational design and optimisation, the entire design process and operating strength verification, concluded with and a successful fatigue test at IMA Materialforschung und Anwendungstechnik GmbH.
In particular, the close cooperation between the designers at Hoheisel Engineering GmbH and our calculation team played a significant role in allowing this component, typically manufactured as a steel casting, to be replaced with an aluminium solution.
The sand-cast component is approx. 1.3 m wide, 3 m long and 600 kg in weight, and was produced in partnership with a Swiss aluminium casting plant, AMG Alu Metall Guss AG, which brought the casting expertise to the project.
