47. Adhesive Bonding for Railway Application

Adhesion is an indispensable joining technology for railway industries. Adhesives are used for the fabrication of almost all rolling stocks. In the steel main structure of conventional rolling stocks, adhesives are applied for bonding decorated aluminum sheets of wall and ceiling to frames, bonding of floor covering to floor plate, and fixing heat insulating material to the inside of carbody. Large amount of sealants is also used even in the conventional rolling stocks. Recent high-speed trains have modern light-weight structures consisting of aluminum hollow extrusions, sandwich panels, or carbon fiber reinforced plastics. For the structures, adhesion plays an important role as a structural joining method. Even for conventional rolling stocks, the use of adhesives is increasing. For instance, weldbonding is nowadays experimentally applied to the aluminum body structures. Moreover, adhesive is used to smooth the outsides of each carbody and between the outersurfaces of carbody and window. As a result, aerodynamic noises inside and outside the train and energy consumption are considerably reduced.

Maglev trains will be increasingly use in the future, and the use of adhesives will expand due to the demand of reducing weight and energy consumption. In this chapter, the cases in Japan are mainly explained. World-wide cases are shown in Sect. 4.