Rolling Contact Fatigue Life Analysis on Rail Track in Ethio-Djibouti Railway Line, Awash Area
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Date
2020-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Now a day the railway transport is becoming the most important transportation sector in Ethiopia. This research paper presents the analysis of rolling contact fatigue damage of rail due to cyclic axle load between the wheel-rail contact using FEM for the existing and newly selected rail steel, for wheel utilizing the material structural steel with grade of R7T and the wheel profile of S1002. The Ethio-Djibouti Railway existing material is structural steel UCI54Kg/m profile grade of 9000A and newly selected material AS60Kg/m grade of AS1085.1, which is selected by using digital logic method. The three types of boundary conditions are: (1) straight, (2) transition, and (3) curved path in terms of track conditions. A three-dimensional geometry and FEA executed by using in SOLIDWORK 2019 and ANSYS 2019R3 Workbench respectively. In the newly constructed Ethio-Djibouti Railway, the RCF has been analyzed the commencing, if not it may cost more incidents, accidents, fatality and excess maintenance cost now and in the future. This research predicates the effect of axel load and train speed on the wheel-rail track for existing and newly selected material by using fatigue life, equivalent alternative stress, equivalent alternative strain, and total deformation. Finally, the fatigue life result showed that there is an increasing rail track crack initiation life cycle by 16.5%, 22.03% and 27.95% for the newly selected material AS60Kg/m grade of AS1085.1 at the straight, transition curve and circular curve respectively which is the most vital area in the rail track which would assist Ethio-Djibouti Railway heavy duty rail line to predicate the fatigue life resistance and pre-inspections ahead failure.
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Keywords
Rolling Contact Fatigue (RCF), Fatigue Life, Finite Element Analysis (FEA), Rail Track, Digital Logic Method