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Railways, as one of the representative mass transit systems, are vulnerable to highly contagious respiratory diseases due to their operation in densely populated environments. Notably, the current convective heating system creates an environment susceptible to virus transmission within railway vehicles. To improve this situation, there have been attempts to introduce radiant heating systems to reduce the risk of virus transmission and create a comfortable indoor environment. Previous studies focused on developing radiant heating composite material for railway vehicles by incorporating a carbon fiber heating element within a glass fiber composite to enable heat generation through joule heating. However, this development was limited to the specimen level. In contrast, this study aims to demonstrate their applicability and performance for actual railway vehicle parts at the component level. Specifically, resin flow and manufacturability were analyzed to assess applicability to railway vehicles. Additionally, heating performance and heat flow characteristics were evaluated to determine heating effects. Based on these results, it is anticipated that the application of multifunctional composite materials in the railway industry will improve the vulnerability to winter viruses and indoor environments and expand the utilization of multifunctional composite materials in various fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The composite material has been widely used in vehicle interiors, particularly in applications such as the wall-side panels of railways. The sandwich honeycomb composite, which combines two composite skins with a metal honeycomb, is the preferred structure in aerospace and railway applications due to its rigidity at minimal weight. As a functional composite material that provides heat flux to passengers, a multilayer sandwich Nomex honeycomb core composite with heating elements has been developed. In this design, the heating element is inserted into the inner composite material as a heat generation component, producing heat transferred to the other side of the panel. The thermal and structural behaviors of the sandwich composite with heating elements are orthotropic and require careful assessment to understand the material characteristics of the developed composite parts. In this study, conduction heat transfer in the functional honeycomb composite is simulated using the Finite Element Method (FEM) and validated with experimental results. The study proposes three steps to solve the problem: determining the heat-transfer parameters, simplifying the Nomex honeycomb core, and conducting a full-scale heat-transfer simulation. This research aids operating systems in controlling the heat generator input to prevent dangerous conditions. The results indicate that the simulation trends closely align with the experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]