Scaling issues related to modeling of railroad car damage I-Derailment, plastic deformation, rupture, and impact

The premise of this paper is the fact that full-scale test of railroad cars are for the most part prohibitively expensive and the corresponding data are limited. Small-scale models of trains are preferable, but the dimensions cannot be resized without having many other physical parameters scaled as well. Sometimes the problems can be reduced easily; often they cannot. In this paper, insight to the four damage mechanisms listed above, and ways to scale them, are analyzed using the mathematical technique of dimensional analysis. Also identified are physical phenomena that do not lend themselves to easy rescaling.