Bullet trains in China can run as fast as 350 kilometres per hour and Chinese researchers want them to take the top speed of 450km/h. China wants even faster bullet trains, and a team of scientists in the southwest of the country have suggested a way to do it: add wings. Their study found that adding five pairs of small wings on each train carriage would generate additional lift and reduce the weight of the train by nearly a third, taking the top speed to 450 kilometres per hour. The research is part of a project launched by Beijing earlier this year named CR450, which aims to develop a new generation of high-speed trains that can travel at that speed.
China’s high-speed rail network is currently the fastest in the world – its existing bullet trains can run at 350km/h. The CR450 project aims to have trains that run nearly 30% faster, meaning it would take only about three hours to travel from Beijing to Shanghai, or just five hours from Beijing to Guangzhou. But “as the operating speed increases, the wear on the wheels will increase and inevitably shorten the repair cycle and service life of the wheels”, according to a paper by the team from the Chengdu Fluid Dynamics Innovation Centre, led by research engineer Zhang Jun. “The high-speed train with lift wings is a breakthrough in the traditional concept of high-speed train aerodynamic design, to reduce overall energy consumption and operating costs,” they said in the paper published in peer-reviewed Chinese journal Acta Aerodynamica Sinica on Thursday.
The idea of putting wings on high-speed trains is not new – Japanese engineers came up with a proposal in the 1980s for a train with plane-like wings extending from the sides, eventually building a prototype two decades later. While this early attempt proved that the wings gave aerodynamic efficiency, it failed in practical applications because the wings were too big and too wide for the train to run safely within the limited space of existing rail infrastructure like security fences and tunnels.
Zhang and his team have proposed something a little different. Instead of putting a pair of giant wings on the sides, they say an array of smaller wings on top of a train could generate sufficient force to lift it without the risk of hitting anything.
Has April 1st come early this year?