Overload Effect on The Life Cycle of Car Body Structures for AALRT Trains

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Date

2017-08-31

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Addis Ababa University

Abstract

Ethiopian railways corporation invest a lot of money and construct AALRT and it's warmly welcomed by the people. Since it is been 1 and half year the trains start working, And even if the design life cycle of AALRT train car body structure should not be less than 30 years, train's body start to degrade from day to day. This will be a problem for AALRT in terms of quality of service, in terms of maintenance cost and damage of train body before design life cycle. This paper aims to discuss the effect of un acceptable passenger over load effect on life cycle of AALRT train car body steel structure and show the effect of different loading conditions by modeling car body steel structure and making analysis using Catia and Ansys software . The methodology of this paper starts by collected real overload condition data's, studied car body frame structure and materials used for AALRT trains, designed frame steel structure of AALRT train using Catia V5R19 software and analyzed by Ansys workbench 15.0 software using seven different loading conditions. The total fatigue life analyzed by using PalmgrenMiner Linear Damage Rule and the final fatigue life cycle result found. The calculated life cycle result converted to time. The output of the analysis shows that some parts of under frame steel structures on Exit/Entrance area have fewer life cycles. The connection of the high floor and low floor area and near to turning table have less life cycle than design life, when the loading condition reach at maximum level . But the total life cycle is above from the design life. Finally the total fatigue life cycle of four parts on Motor car had below the design life cycle. By adding additional reinforcement to those four parts, it is possible to increase the fatigue life. Even it can resist the over load at standing and seat area beyond designed load limit.

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Keywords

AALRT, car body, steel structures, Overload effect

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