Improving the design of the traction motor of trains to reduce the aerodynamic noise

The traction motor of trains, which is the core equipment in the railway industry, is a major noise source. As the protection of the environment becomes increasingly more important, the regulations regarding acceptable train noise are becoming stricter. Therefore, more studies on the traction motor of trains are required to find a method to reduce the noise. The existing studies on this topic are insufficient because of the high cost of producing prototypes and the absence of an aerodynamic noise analysis scheme with proven reliability. In this study, the noise performance of the traction motor of trains was evaluated using the numerical analysis of the lattice Boltzmann method, and its effect on the design variables of the traction motor was analyzed. To conduct this study, a reliable numerical analysis scheme was established by evaluating the performance of the base model through an experiment and numerical analysis and comparing the two results. In addition, seven major noise sources, including the size of the cooling fan, blade shape, number of blades, slot wedge shape, and clamp shape, were selected by analyzing the result of the numerical analysis of the base model. The effect of each design variable on the performance of the base model was analyzed by assessing the performance of cases that reflect the design modification of the chosen design variables. Based on the result, a complementary design model was designed to reduce noise, and the performance of this model was evaluated using numerical analysis and compared with that of the base model. From the results, it was confirmed that the newly created model produces much lower noise than the base model.