Fatigue Failure Analysis on Curved Rail of Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit (AALRT)
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Date
2017-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The rails are the supporting parts with which the wheels are in contact. Rails, as the heart of the
railway system, are subjected to very high service loads and harsh environmental conditions.
Fatigue failure in rails can be initiated at the rail head, at the web and/or at the foot. The main
objective of the study is analyzing fatigue on curved rail due to cyclic wheel load that causes
failures and determining fatigue life of rail in Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit. The fatigue
analysis on curved rail route on going with 3D modelling on CATIA V5 software and imported
to ANSYSv16 workbench software for finite element analysis. The analysis deals with the
curved rail route profile with fifty meter radius located at three places (stadium, saint lideta and
autobistera) with working period during morning peak hour, day flat hour, and afternoon peak
hour. During the analysis of wheel/rail contact in ANSYS software, the parameters have been
used are wheel vertical load, wheel lateral load, angular velocity and gravitational acceleration.
From ANSYS workbench software result at stadium during afternoon peak hour is highly
exposed to the equivalent alternating stress, pressure distribution and fatigue damage than the
result at saint lideta and autobistera. For this reason, the rail service life at stadium during
afternoon peak hour is small as compared to the rail service life at saint lideta and autobistera
curved rail route location. On the curved rail at autobistera: the equivalent alternating stress,
pressure distribution and fatigue damage is small in comparison to the curved rail at stadium and
saint lideta. The fatigue life will be better at autobistera.
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Keywords
Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit (AALRT), Fatigue failure on curved rail, Fatigue life