A recent 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 kilometers 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 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,” the team said in the paper published in the peer-reviewed Chinese journal Acta Aerodynamica Sinica.
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