Fatigue Life Prediction of a Railway Bogie Frame due to Wheel Out-of-Roundness. A Case Study of Ethio-Djbouti Railway
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Date
2023-08
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Railway transportation is one of the most common effective, safe and efficient mode of transportation used in many countries around the world. However, the failure of a bogie frame as a vital component that supports almost overall weight of the vehicle, can significantly affect the operation system. Mostly, it fails due to fatigue phenomenon brought on by various impact. The purpose of this research is to predict the fatigue life of a bogie frame due to wheel out-of-roundness (OOR). This research was focused on a freight bogie at Ethio-Djibouti railway (EDR), mostly faced with fatigue failure due to high load compare to a passenger vehicle. Wheel OOR cases have been integrated into a multibody system model with SIMPACK where dynamic loads that act on a frame have been extracted and applied to the finite element model with ANSYS to get stress and strain distributions used to predict lifecycles. Through the simulation scenarios with three cases of out-of-roundness with maximum radius deviation of 1 mm, 2 mm and 5 mm, the results show that the wheel OOR with high amplitude induce high non-monotonic impact forces that account for high stresses and reduce the life of a bogie frame. The results from this study show that the lifecycles are 8.2e7, 7.2e6 and 4.4e5 cycles for the case of out-of-roundness with 1 mm, 2 mm and 5 mm radius deviation, respectively. It shows that the bogie frame can operate below recommended fatigue lifecycles which is 2e6 cycles at the case of OOR with 5 mm and the study recommend to operate at wheel OOR with radius deviation below 2 mm. This study has significant to the maintenance department to enhance the countermeasures for minimizing the effects of OOR on bogie frame’s life.
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A bogie frame, fatigue life, wheel out-of-roundness, finite element method, multibody system.