Abstract
Rolling contact fatigue (RCF) is a common cause of rail failure due to repeated stresses at the wheel-rail contact. This phenomenon is a real problem that greatly affects the safety of train operation. Preventive and corrective maintenance tasks have a big impact on the Life Cycle Cost (LCC) of railway assets, and therefore cutting-edge strategies based on predictive functionalities are needed to reduce it. A methodology based on physical models is proposed to predict the degradation of railway tracks due to RCF. This work merges a crack initiation and a crack growth model along with a fully nonlinear multibody model. From a multibody assessment of the vehicle-track interaction, an energy dissipation method is used to identify points where cracks are expected to appear. At these points, crack propagation is calculated considering the contact conditions as a function of crack depth. The proposed methodology has been validated with field measurements, conducted using Eddy Currents provided by the infrastructure manager Network Rail. Validation results show that RCF behavior can be predicted for track sections with different characteristics without the necessity of previous on-track measurements.
Highlights
Accepted: 20 January 2021In recent years, the use of railway vehicles has increased in aid of the environment and human mobility with less energy consumption than conventional transportation methods
The use of different degradation modules enhances the results provided by Multibody Simulations (MBS), which allows with a more representative assessment of the degradation of the whole infrastructure system
The characteristics of MBS models are associated with different files, which can be updated at the start of the process from databases
Summary
The use of railway vehicles has increased in aid of the environment and human mobility with less energy consumption than conventional transportation methods. Jun et al [21] carried out the calculation of the minimum crack size for growth under rolling contact between wheel and rail, based on a previous work of Fletcher et al [22] Other works, such as the one developed by Markine et al [23], deal with the track properties to combat RCF. The main motivation of this paper is the development of a methodology to predict the occurrence and evolution of rail RCF cracks This methodology allows comparing different track configurations taking into account the running performance of the vehicles, assessed by Multibody Simulations (MBS). Since track quality influences RCF risk [28,29], this methodology could be used to predict other degradation mechanisms (such as ballast settlement [30] and rail wearing).
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