On July 10, the Scientific and Technological Innovation Conference of China State Railway Group Co., Ltd. was held in Beijing. During the conference, the All-China Federation of Railway Workers’ Unions presented the ‘Locomotive’ trophies and medals to outstanding railway scientific and technological innovation collectives and individuals. Professor Gao Guangjun from our school received the ‘Locomotive Medal’ for outstanding individuals.

Professor Gao Guangjun has closely aligned his work with the national strategic needs of ‘Building a Strong Transportation Nation.’ Addressing the critical issue of significant casualties in train collisions, and focusing on the goal of ‘improving train crashworthiness to protect occupants,’ he has invented active coordinated energy dissipation and trajectory maintenance technology for train collisions. This technology solves the problem of coordinated distribution of train collision energy dissipation, ensuring that the energy absorption capacity of each vehicle meets design requirements. He also invented train collision trajectory maintenance technology, achieving self-centering during train collisions, preventing wheel derailment, and enabling automatic repositioning. Furthermore, he invented full-stroke progressive plastic deformation technologies such as tearing, shearing, and necking, as well as repeatable hydraulic energy absorption technology. These innovations address challenges such as large residual structural stroke and severe fluctuations in impact force, achieving stable impact force and a deformation compression rate exceeding 95%. The technology overcomes the limitations of current practices in countries like the UK, France, Germany, and the USA, where collision energy can only be dissipated passively and safe collision speeds are low. It also addresses the lack of centering anti-climbing mechanisms between trains and the absence of anti-derailment devices between wheels and rails, which fail to effectively suppress collision climbing and ‘zigzag’ derailment. This has significantly improved train collision safety, achieving a safe collision speed for high-speed trains that is 40% higher than the international standard and 44% higher for urban rail trains. Anti-derailment capability has been doubled. The project has been fully applied to China’s highest operational speed 350 km/h ‘Fuxing’ EMU trains and the 400 km/h cross-border interoperable high-speed EMU trains. The energy absorption technology has been applied to the energy-absorbing structural design of urban subway trains exported to countries including Canada, the United States, and Australia. The research results have received 3 national-level science and technology awards and over 10 provincial/ministerial-level awards. He holds 52 Chinese invention patents and 10 authorized patents from the USA, Europe, Japan, and Russia. He has participated in compiling one industry standard and published 138 SCI/EI-indexed papers. He has been selected for national talent programs including the National Ten Thousand Talents Program for Scientific and Technological Innovation Leaders and the Transportation Youth Science and Technology Elite. He concurrently serves as Director of the National-Local Joint Engineering Research Center for Rail Transit Train Safety Assurance Technology, Deputy Director of the National Key Laboratory for Heavy-Haul, Fast, and High-Power Electric Locomotives, Secretary-General of a Sub-committee of the Ministry of Education’s Teaching Guidance Committee, Deputy Secretary-General of the Hunan Provincial Teaching Guidance Committee, Vice Chairman of the Hunan Railway Society, Member of the Expert Committee of the National Railway Administration, and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the journal ‘Transportation Safety and Environment’.

The National Railway System Locomotive Medal, also known as the All-Railway Locomotive Medal, commonly referred to as the Locomotive Medal, is the individual award of the Locomotive Award, selected by the All-China Federation of Railway Workers’ Unions.

Article reprinted from Central South University News Network (First review: Wang Xinyao, Second review: Wang Xuan, Third review: Li Yin).