On the fatigue performance and residual life of intercity railway axles with inside axle boxes

•Intercity railway axles were studied in terms of the fatigue performance and remaining life.•The critical safety region was at the centre axle rather than the transition of traditional axles.•A larger crack limit (a = 1.0 mm) seems to be permitted for the operation reliability and durability.•Kitag...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Engineering fracture mechanics 2018-06, Vol.197, p.176-191
Main Authors: Wu, S.C., Liu, Y.X., Li, C.H., Kang, G.Z., Liang, S.L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Axleboxes
Crack propagation
Cracks
Damage tolerance
Damage tolerance method
Fatigue crack growth rate
Fatigue damage accumulation
Fatigue failure
Inspection
Inspection interval
Materials fatigue
Modified Kitagawa-Takahashi diagram
Shafts (machine elements)
Transportation terminals
Urban rail
Wheelsets
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:•Intercity railway axles were studied in terms of the fatigue performance and remaining life.•The critical safety region was at the centre axle rather than the transition of traditional axles.•A larger crack limit (a = 1.0 mm) seems to be permitted for the operation reliability and durability.•Kitagawa-Takahashi diagram can effectively bridge the safe-life with damage tolerance design. Railway axles with inside axle boxes have a great potential in modern urban railway system due to good dynamic performance on small-radius track. However, because of entirely different loading nature from widely-used one, a challenging problem of the fatigue performance and damage endurance arises in the case of defects from various external sources. In this paper, a stepwise fatigue assessment framework composed of safe life as the first level and damage tolerance as the second level was tentatively proposed for the wheelset with inside axle boxes. An assumed load spectrum was employed to estimate the remaining life for a damaged axle made of the EA4T steel. Calculated results show that the critical safety region has been transferred to the axle center in contrast to classical axles, where a 1.0 mm-depth crack as the inspection limit has less probability to propagate. Besides, the wheelset with inside axle boxes shows the smaller stress value. The analysis from well-known Kitagawa-Takahashi diagram indicates a security risk while only using nominal stress approach.
ISSN:0013-7944
1873-7315
DOI:10.1016/j.engfracmech.2018.04.046