The second generation of the low speed maglev traffic engineering research
Maglev transportation first originated in Germany, engineering research began in the 1960 s. Japan's low speed maglev engineering began in the early 1970 s. There are only Germany HSST TR series; Japan HSST series .These two series all have achieved the commercial demonstration in high-speed maglev train category (500 km/h level) and low-speed category (100 km/h level). Two systems all took about 33 years from engineering to the commercial use, which means almost a generation each four years, these two kinds of maglev trains have been put into commercial use for about ten years, the two countries were not awarded the opportunity to achieve 2 business line, it shows that system application exists the real bottleneck.
In spite of this, other countries remain highly interest in the future of the maglev transportation development potential especially South Korea, although it started later than China, its business model line has been built, and since the construction is still not officially open to traffic, at the same time the planned two lines have been cancelled. This stated that the low-speed maglev train exists certain difficulty and key technology, but also have certain characteristics and popularization value.
Other countries such as America, Canada, irrespectively put forward the medium-speed maglev train n 2003 and 2012. Brazil proposed using superconducting technology in low speed maglev train plan, but the technology maturity has yet to reach the level of commercial use. It also notes technology innovation in the field of low and medium speed maglev traffic is still very active.
In 2014, China`s two lines in the low speed maglev demonstration line business have been built, one is the Changsha airport line, the other is Beijing S1 line. And just like South Korea, it used Japan`s low-speed maglev train technology, so it will encounter similar technical difficulties, increase the cost, either, like South Korea, line standard is slightly lower than Japan, but the debugging process is very long, and has repeatedly delayed opening time .So now the engineering units and train manufacturing units of China's two commercial demonstration lines have a lot of differences in circuit requirements, the fundamental reasons of the differences is the maglev train car track coupling vibration problem is very outstanding, it needs to improve line requirement to adapt to the technical status of the train.
Anyhow, low-speed maglev train owns the most attractive characteristic, that is, low vibration, low noise, large slope, small corner, these features are traditional metro light rail cannot reach, but there is also the bottleneck of system promotion which is the relatively low traction efficiency. Its market positioning is not clear, at present only can be set as a special traffic pattern, it cannot be regard as a regular traffic pattern, but it has widely promote the prospects.
Therefore it has the vital significance to research and develop the second generation of low-speed maglev train and engineering technology research to break the current deadlock, and also it can provide a "low cost, high speed, small corner - big ramp - low noise, low vibration and less maintenance" medium capacity system for urban transportation, and promote maglev traffic widespread application in urban rail transit based on the low speed maglev transportation technology of conduct targeted research.